Dictators, Democrats, and Detectives*
Why was there no flowering [of the detective story] under the Roman Empire, when an urban population sought amusement in the butchery of the circus, and might have been more cheaply appeased by stories of law-breaking and discovery? Perhaps a faulty law of evidence was to blame. —E. M. WRONG.
I
A FEW months before the outbreak of the Second World War, press dispatches from totalitarian Italy announced to the outside world that the works of Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace, the two English detective story writers most popular in Italian translation, had been banned from the country by decree of the Fascist party. No reason was stated for the decision. But early in 1941 a more explicit action was reported from the Third Reich, where the Nazi party ordered the withdrawal of all imported detective fiction from German bookshops. As spokesman for the party line, the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was quoted in angry denunciation of this "illegitimate offspring" of English literature. Detective stories, the newspaper thundered, were nothing but "pure liberalism," designed to "stuff the heads of German readers with foreign ideas."
These actions were dismissed by many citizens of free lands simply as further instances of the reasonless stupidity (once so amusing!) of dictatorships. But those readers who paused to recall the genesis, history, and very premises of detective fiction found little that was surprising in the edicts—save that they had been deferred so long. For the detective story is and always has been essentially a democratic institution; produced on any large scale only in democracies; dramatizing, under the bright cloak of entertainment, many of the precious rights and privileges that have set the dwellers in constitutional lands apart from those less fortunate.
"Detectives," wrote the late E. M. Wrong of Oxford in a notable dictum, "cannot flourish until the public has an idea what constitutes proof." It is precisely this close affinity between detection and evidence which accounts for the interrelation of the fictionized form and democracy. For, of all the democratic heritages, none has been more stubbornly defended by free peoples the world over than the right of fair trial—the credo that no man shall be convicted of crime in the absence of reasonable proof, safeguarded by known, just, and logical rules. The profession of detection thus owes its being directly to the fact that democracies require and scrutinize evidence; that they conscientiously attempt to punish the actual perpetrators of crime, not the first victims who come conveniently to hand. This state of affairs prevails not only because the citizens of enlightened lands expect and demand fair play and impartial justice as a matter of right, but also because it is the only method by which governments that rule by consent rather than by force can adequately curb and control crime. Hence detection, hence detectives—hence the detective story.
Conversely, it is easy to understand why detection, as distinct from espionage, has played little part in despotisms of either the ancient or the modern variety. Where civil rights do not exist, where star chamber methods prevail, where "justice" is dispensed by self-constituted oligarchies, confident of their supreme wisdom and divine rightness on all occasions—even if the rules must be changed in the middle of the game!—there is obviously slight need or opportunity for methodical criminal investigation with accuracy and impartiality for its objectives. . . . Dictatorships, of course, would be delighted to have us misled by the surface similarity of democratic criminal investigation (object: impartial evidence for the legal determination of guilt) and their own gestapo and ogpu systems (object: rule by fear and intrigue). Actually the two are, suorum generum, the landmarks of opposite poles of civilization—and there are but few to-day who can remain wilfully blind to the fact.
It is equally comprehensible why despotic governments should seek to discourage the reading of imported detective stories, as in the Italian and German instances cited. For, obviously, no literary form so irrevocably wedded to the exercise of reason as the detective novel could conceivably be welcomed by predatory hegemonies, dependent on uncritical acceptance of propaganda for their very survival. The fuehrer principle and logical thought are simply no more compatible than oil and water! It was no accident that the first really spontaneous revulsion of democratic peoples against totalitarianism coincided with the perpetration of such shameless sophistries as the farcical Reichstag-fire trial and the fantastic Stalin-purge tribunals. This revulsion was not only a testimony of a greater humanity; it was a revelation as well of profound differences of mind. Millions who had been only vaguely aware of distantly unpleasant philosophies suddenly discovered themselves personally outraged by these mockeries of institutions so sacred in the republics that they have come to be taken for granted. ("These truths we hold to be self-evident. . . .")
But (the alert reader may object) why should virtually all detective stories worth the name be limited, as they have been, to England, France, America, and to a lesser extent the Scandinavian commonwealths? What, for instance, of the Central European republics between 1918 and the Brown Plague—or, for that matter, of the pre-1914 Teutonic empires which, for all their military autocracy, developed some excellent police organizations and even occasional civil liberalism? Why did none of these produce significant detective fiction? In the first place, aside from wide political considerations too complex to be discussed here, there is no guaranty that even centuries of democracy and competent criminal procedure will produce a corresponding literature in every race or land—any more than notable music or drama or art can be accurately forecast. To borrow a phrase from the law, the relationship between the roman policier and civil liberty is permissive, not mandatory. In the second place, there has always been a substantial and varying "time-lag" between responsible police systems and their fictional counterpart.
An eminent devotee of detective fiction, the recent Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Hewart of Bury, has suggested somewhere in his delightful obiter dicta that "the detective story, as distinct from the crime story, flourishes only in a settled community where the readers' sympathies are on the side of law and order, and not on the side of the criminal who is trying to escape from justice."
This is another way of saying what has been set forth in the preceding paragraphs. It is an expression of the same fundamental contradiction between the We and They in government—the distinction, again, between government by consent and government by force. When the government is Our government, Our sympathies are on the side of the law We made. When the government is Their government, Our sympathies are instinctively with the lone wretch ("there but for the grace of God go I") whom They are hunting down. Tyranny hatches not only rebels, but a subsequent literature of roguery: thus Robin Hood and his "blood" brothers in benevolent crime. When a government is truly popular, the Robin Hoods are few and far between. The brief American glorification of the gangster had its origin in the lifetime of an unpopular law; when the law was repealed, the sentimentalism quickly evaporated. We still have lovable rascals in the literatures of the democracies, but they grow notably fewer with the passing of time. That they will ever completely disappear is unlikely—sympathy for the underdog is a democratic trait, too. Perhaps the very preference of detective story readers for the amateur who reaches the solution ahead of the official police is an unconscious rationalized survival, a last, vestigial, inverted remnant of the Robin Hood instinct.
Dorothy Sayers must have had something of the sort in mind when she wrote that the modern fictional detective is the "true successor of Roland and Lancelot"; and presumably most Anglo-Saxon readers look at the matter in a similar light. So long as our hero is on the side of the angels, what boots it if pompous officialdom be pricked a little? It will do them good, teach them to be on their toes next time! But it is curiously revealing that this same emphasis on the amateur, with his freedom to think, act, and criticize, constitutes one of the most violent of the stated German objections to the detective story. There is, when one comes to think of it, good reason for the outcry from the apostles of the "New Order." As the New York Times said in comment on the Nazi fulminations: "Who ever heard of a German amateur student of crime punching holes in the official explanation of the Reichstag fire?" If one were so disposed, something quite profound might be added at this point about the wide gulf between the kind of mentality which sees Might and Right as inseparable—and the free mind which dares proclaim that they have no relation whatsoever!
But we wander afield. The significant thing to know and remember is that detection and the detective story definitely thrive in proportion to the strength of the democratic tradition and the essential decency of nations; while the closer governments approach legalized gangsterism and rule-by-force, the less likely we are to find conscientious criminal investigation or any body of competent detective literature.
Wars, it has been said in a somewhat tarnished phrase, have been won on the playing fields of Eton. By the same hyperbolic and still rather magnificent license, one might reasonably depict the titanic events in progress as these lines are written in terms of a struggle between civilizations which find fictive release and recreation in the wholesome atmosphere of Baker Street and Scotland Yard—and conflicting concepts of life and living that can have no use for a literary form so instinct with logic, fair play, justice, and denial of force. The point may seem a trivial one, but it symbolizes inherent boundaries of the mind that by no means stop with the Atlantic Ocean. When the countrymen of SHERLOCK HOLMES and LECOQ, of ROULETABILLE and FATHER BROWN, of PHILIP TRENT and POIROT, accepted the challenge of the too grimly real Moriarty of Europe, little wonder that no neutrality of the spirit was possible in the land of DUPIN, UNCLE ABNER, and CHARLIE CHAN!
* Reprinted, in part, from The Saturday Review of Literature (New York); The Spectator (London); and Kort en Goed (Johannesburg).