Fontaine, 17 NOVEMBER 1943
This article was published originally in French as ‘Grandeur et décadence du roman policier anglais’ in a cumulative issue of Fontaine, 37–40, of some 500 pages. It later appeared as a book, Aspects de la Littérature Anglaise (1918– 1945), dropping some articles, adding several others, and making changes to some, those to Orwell’s essay being of little significance. The issue was attacked as Roman Catholic propaganda even before it was published but that was fiercely contradicted by J.B. Brunius in Tribune. Given Orwell’s antipathy to Roman Catholicism it would be surprising were he to participate in such propaganda. Orwell had a facility for languages. Although his articles were translated for him into French, he corresponded with his translators – R.N. Raimbault and Yvonne Davet – in French, although accents were often omitted (in part because he was using an English-language typewriter).
It was between 1920 and 1940 that the majority of detective stories were written and read, but this is precisely the period that marks the decline of the detective story as a literary genre. Throughout these troubled and frivolous years, ‘crime stories’ as they were called (this title includes the detective story proper as well as the ‘thriller’ where the author follows the conventions of Grand Guignol), were in England a universal palliative equal to tea, aspirins, cigarettes and the wireless. These works were mass-produced, and it is not without some surprise that we find that their authors include professors of political economy and Roman Catholics as well as Anglican priests. Any amateur who had never dreamed of writing a novel felt capable of tackling a detective story, which requires only the haziest knowledge of toxicology and a plausible alibi to conceal the culprit. Yet soon the detective story started to get more complicated; it demanded more ingenuity if its author were to satisfy the reader’s constantly growing appetite for violence and thirst for bloodshed. The crimes became more sensational and more difficult to unravel. It is nevertheless a fact that in this multitude of later works there is hardly anything worth re-reading.
Things were not always like this. Entertaining books are not necessarily bad books. Between 1880 and 1920 we had in England three specialists in the detective novel who showed undeniably artistic qualities. Conan Doyle of course belonged to this trio, together with two writers who are not his equal, but who should not be despised: Ernest Bramah and R. Austin Freeman. The Memoirs and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Max Carrados and The Eyes of Max Carrados by Bramah, The Eye of Osiris and The Singing Bone by Freeman are, together with the two or three short stories of Edgar Allan Poe which inspired them, the classics of English detective fiction. We can find in each of these works a quality of style, and even better an atmosphere, which we do not usually find in contemporary authors (Dorothy Sayers, for example, or Agatha Christie or Freeman Wills Croft). The reasons for this are worth examining.
Even today, more than half a century after his first appearance, Sherlock Holmes remains one of the most popular characters in the English novel. His slim, athletic build, his beaky nose, his crumpled dressing gown, the cluttered rooms of his Baker Street flat with their alcoves and test tubes, the violin, the tobacco in the Indian slipper, the bullet marks on the walls, all this is part of the intellectual furniture of the Englishman who knows his authors. Moreover the exploits of Sherlock Holmes have been translated into some twenty languages, from Norwegian to Japanese. The other two authors I mentioned, Ernest Bramah and R. Austin Freeman, never reached such a wide public, but both of them created unforgettable characters. Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke is the laboratory detective, the forensic scientist who solves the mystery with his microscope and camera. As for Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, he is blind, but his blindness only serves to sharpen his other senses, and he is all the better because of it. If we seek to determine why we are drawn to these three authors, we are led to a preliminary observation of a purely technical nature, one which emphasises the weakness of the modern detective story and of all English short stories of the past twenty years.
We can see that the vintage detective story (from Poe to Freeman) is much more dense than the modern novel. The dialogue is richer, the digressions more frequent. If the stories of Conan Doyle or Poe had been written yesterday, it is doubtful whether any editor would have accepted them. They are too long for the compact magazines of today, and their interminable opening scenes run counter to the current fad for economy.
Yet it is by accumulating details which at first seem superfluous that Conan Doyle, like Dickens before him, gains his most striking effects. If you set out to examine the Sherlock Holmes stories, you find that the eccentricities and the perspicacity of a character are principally revealed in episodes which do not form an integral part of the plot. Holmes is especially distinguished by his method of ‘reasoning by deduction’ which amazes the good Doctor Watson. We can see an example at the beginning of The Blue Carbuncle. Holmes only has to examine a bowler hat found in the street to give a detailed—and, as subsequent events prove, exact— description of its owner. Yet the hat incident has only the vaguest connection with the main events; several episodes are preceded by six or seven pages of conversation which do not claim to be anything but digressions pure and simple. These conversations act as a vehicle to demonstrate Holmes’s genius and Watson’s naivety.
Ernest Bramah and R. Austin Freeman also write with the same contempt for conciseness. It is largely thanks to their digressions that their stories are literary works and not mere ‘puzzles’.
The vintage detective story is not necessarily founded on a mystery, and it is worth reading even if it does not end with a surprise or a sensational revelation. The most annoying thing about the writers of modern detective stories is their constant, almost painful effort to hide the culprit’s identity—and this convention is doubly annoying because it soon palls on a reader, who eventually finds the intricacies of concealment grotesque. On the other hand, in several of Conan Doyle’s stories and in Poe’s famous story The Purloined Letter, the perpetrator of the crime is known at the outset. How will he react? How, in the end, will he be brought to justice? That is what is so intriguing. Austin Freeman sometimes has the audacity to describe the crime first in minute detail, then merely explains how the mystery was solved. In the earlier stories, the crime is not necessarily sensational or ingeniously contrived. In the modern detective story the key incident is almost always a murder (the formula hardly changes: a corpse, a dozen suspects, each with a watertight alibi); but the earlier stories often deal with petty crimes, perhaps the culprit is no more than a third-rate thief. There may even turn out to be neither culprit nor crime. Many of the mysteries investigated by Holmes fade away in the broad light of day. Bramah wrote ten or twenty stories, of which only two or three deal with a murder. The authors can indulge themselves like this because the success of their work depends, not on the unmasking of the criminal, but in the interest the reader finds in an account of the methods of detection so dear to Holmes, Thorndyke or Carrados. These characters appeal to the imagination, and the reader, if he reacts as he is meant to, transforms them into intellectual giants.
It is now possible for us to make a fundamental distinction between the two schools of detective story – the old and the new.
The earlier writers believed in their own characters. They made their detectives into exceptionally gifted individuals, demi-gods for whom they felt a boundless admiration. Against our present-day background of world wars, mass unemployment, famines, plague and totalitarianism, crime has lost much of its savour; we know far too much about its social and economic causes to look upon the ordinary detective as a benefactor of mankind. Nor is it easy for us to consider as an end in itself the mental gymnastics demanded of us by this kind of work. Sitting in the darkness that accompanies him everywhere, Poe’s Dupin uses his mental faculties without ever thinking of action; because of this, he does not arouse in us quite the admiration which Poe feels for him. The Mystery of Marie Roget, a typical example of pure mental acrobatics, demanding from its reader the agility of a crossword-puzzle addict, could only have appeared in a more leisured age. In the Sherlock Holmes stories you catch the author taking evident pleasure in this display of virtuosity, which seems totally detached from the plot. It is the same with Silver Blaze, The Musgrave Ritual, The Dancing Men, or the sort of episode that allows Holmes to deduce the life-history of a passer-by from his appearance, or to astound Watson by guessing what he is thinking at that very moment. And yet the work which these detectives were striving to accomplish was obviously important for their creators. During the peaceful years at the close of the last century, Society seemed mainly composed of law-abiding people, whose security was disturbed only by the criminal. In his contemporaries’ eyes, Dr Moriarty was as demoniac a figure as Hitler is today. The man who defeated Moriarty became a knight errant or a national hero. And when Conan Doyle, sending Holmes to his death at the end of The Memoirs,1 allows Watson to echo the words of Plato’s farewell to Socrates, there is no fear of his seeming ridiculous.2
Among modern writers, there are only two who seem to us to believe in their detectives: G. K. Chesterton and Edgar Wallace. Yet their motives are not as disinterested as those of Doyle or Freeman. Wallace, an extraordinarily prolific and gifted writer in a morbid genre, was inspired by his own private form of sadism which there is no time to analyse here. Chesterton’s hero, Father Brown, is a Catholic priest used by Chesterton as an instrument of religious propaganda. In the other detective stories, at least in those I have read, I can see either a comic side, or a rather unconvincing effort on the author’s part to create an atmosphere of horror around crimes which he himself has great difficulty in finding horrific. And then, to achieve their aims, the detectives in contemporary novels rely first and foremost on luck and intuition. They are less intellectual than the heroes of Poe, Doyle, Freeman or Bramah. It is clear that for the earlier writers, Holmes, Thorndyke and many others are all the prototype of the man of science, or, rather, of omniscience, who owes everything to logic and nothing to chance. Chesterton’s Father Brown possesses almost magical powers. Holmes is a nineteenth-century rationalist. In creating this character Conan Doyle faithfully reproduced his contemporaries’ idea of a scientist.
In the last century the detective was always a bachelor. That must be taken as further proof of his superiority. The modern detective also has a marked taste for celibacy (a wife does rather complicate matters in a detective story), but the celibacy of Holmes and Thorndyke is of a particularly monkish kind. It is stated categorically that neither of them is interested in the opposite sex. It is felt that the wise man should not be married, just as the Saint must practise celibacy. The wise man should have a complementary character beside him—the fool. The contrast accentuates the wise man’s good qualities. This role is reserved for the police chief whose problems are solved by Dupin in The Purloined Letter. Jarvis, the fool who seconds Dr Thorndyke, lacks depth, but Mr Carlyle, Max Carrados’s friend, is a well-rounded character. As for Watson, whose imbecility is almost chronic, he is a more lifelike character than Holmes himself. It is by design, and not accidental, that the early detectives are amateurs rather than police officers. It fell to Edgar Wallace to set the fashion for the professional Scotland Yard officer. This respect for the amateur is characteristically British. We can see in Sherlock Holmes a certain resemblance to one of his contemporaries, Raffles, the gentleman thief, the English counterpart of Arsène Lupin. Yet the unofficial role of the early sleuth serves once again to reveal superior gifts. In the early Sherlock Holmes stories and in some Dr Thorndyke adventures, the police are clearly hostile to outside investigators. The professionals constantly make mistakes and do not hesitate to accuse innocent people. Holmes’s analytical genius and Thorndyke’s encyclopaedic knowledge only shine more brightly against the background of humdrum official routine.
In this brief study I have only been able to write at length about one group of writers and I have not discussed foreign writers or American novelists apart from Poe. Since 1920 the output of detective stories has been enormous and the war has not slowed it down, yet, for the reasons I have tried to stress, the magic wand of yesteryear has lost its power. There is more ingenuity in the modern novel, but the authors seem incapable of creating an atmosphere. First place among modern writers should probably go to the brooding Edgar Wallace, more likely to terrorize his reader than to guide him through a jungle of complex problems. Mention must be made of Agatha Christie, who handles dialogue elegantly and shows artistry in laying false trails. The much vaunted short stories of Dorothy Sayers would probably have attracted little attention if the author had not had the bright idea of making her detective the son of a Duke. As for the works of the other contemporary writers, Freeman Wills Croft, G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, Ngaio Marsh and Philip Macdonald, they have scarcely more relevance to literature than a crossword puzzle.
It is not difficult to imagine that a novel conceived as a pure intellectual exercise, like The Gold Bug, might appear again one day. But it is unlikely to reappear as a detective story. I have already said, and this seems to me a significant fact, that the best detective story writers could exploit smallscale crimes. It is hard to believe that the game of cops and robbers could still inspire writers of the stature of Conan Doyle, let alone Poe. The detective story as we know it belonged to the nineteenth century, above all to the end of the nineteenth century. It belonged to the London of the eighties and nineties, to that gloomy and mysterious London where men in high-domed bowler hats slipped out into the flickering light of the gas lamps, where the bells of hansom cabs jingled through perpetual fogs; it belonged to the period when English public opinion was more deeply stirred by the exploits of Jack the Ripper3 than by the problems of Irish Home Rule or the Battle of Majuba.4