The Future of the Detective Story
The detective in literature is hardly more than fifty years old, but already he is passing into decay. He has enjoyed extraordinary popularity, and may even claim to be the one person equally beloved by statesmen and errand boys. His old achievements enthrall as ever. But he makes no new conquests.... From henceforth he retires to limbo with the dodo and the District Railway's trains. He carries with him the regret of a civilized world.—"The Passing of the Detective in Literature," London Academy, December 30, 1905.
I
THE demise, or at least the decline, of the detective story has been erroneously predicted so many times that, by process of antithesis, an equally unwarranted assumption of its indestructibility has been created. Even the most devoted friends of the medium, however, must concede that two possible perils lie in its path. The one, that the day may yet arrive when internal exhaustion will summon the bankruptcy accountant, exactly as unfriendly critics have been prophesying for many years past. The other, that a form of writing at once so closely allied with a specific way of life and law, and at the same time so frankly recreational in its purposes, is particularly at the mercy of the kind of external events and forces tragically prevalent in large areas of the world's surface as these paragraphs are penned.
The first hazard—if it in fact exists—may conceivably be overcome by intelligence and labor if it is recognized in time; the second is a danger not to be controlled or ameliorated by any efforts of authors, editors, publishers, or booksellers.
Confining our attention, then, as we must, to the first possibility: it seems reasonable to say that the immediate prospect of self-exhaustion of the form is no greater and no less to-day than it has been at any time during the past twenty-five years. On the debit side, we must acknowledge that the number of basically original themes (if not the combinations and variations of them) available to the detective story is inevitably declining under the combined pressure of time and increased production. On the credit side stands the marvelous advance which the form has recorded in technique and literary stature in the last two decades.
It is conceivable, of course, that even this new skill may not stave off forever a point of eventually diminishing returns, but such a point is not likely to be reached in current lifetimes. And when and if it be reached, the probability is that the police novel will merely be diverted into some new and as yet unthought-of channel. As Vincent Starrett suggests (not without apprehension, one notes with approval) we may even some day have novels about detectives "as we now have novels about clergymen and physicians and peanut vendors."
To predict the unequivocal doom of the detective story from internal causes is, in fact, like forecasting the disappearance of the love story, the historical novel, the epic poem, or the drama. Such predictions have not been lacking in literary history, and each one of these fundamental forms has indeed undergone periods of stagnation and disfavor—only to reëmerge, often in new garb. Although the detective tale may not be "fundamental" in quite the same sense, it has nevertheless come to fill a particular niche and need in modern life that seemingly can not be satisfied by any other literary form now extant.
Mention has already been made of the accelerated demand for detective stories in the bomb-shelters of London. In America, book-sellers and librarians report a like increase at times of national crisis; while only recently so rigorously intellectual a journal as the New Republic has admitted reviews of detective fiction to its columns for the first time, in the stated belief that this form of fiction has a useful function to fulfil in days of doubt and distress. These instances are only a few of numerous straws in the wind, indicative of the solid position the ratiocinative crime novel occupies in contemporary existence.
Not that—to be quite fair—there are no good arguments on the other side. A most intelligent minority report has, in fact, been recently filed by Philip Van Doren Stern under the appropriate title "The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley." Published in the Virginia Quarterly Review for Spring 1941, on the hundredth anniversary of Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," this able critique sees the modern police novel doomed in its second century by its own readers. With many of Mr. Stern's thoughtful contentions—that the urgent want of the crime story to-day is not novelty of apparatus but novelty of approach, that a return to first principles, to simplicity and plausibility, is needed, as well as closer attention to character and literary merit—one can only express unqualified agreement. But his central thesis, that the detective story is currently being stifled by a small group of dictatorial readers who would throttle all attempts at originality, seems less capable of sustained proof.
"Heaven help the writer who tries to give [these readers] anything but the old familiar brand!" cries Mr. Stern. Unhappily, there are such bigoted readers as he describes, and every book-seller knows them only too well. Still, one question may be pertinent. If the situation perceived by Mr. Stern is as prevalent as he thinks, how are we to account for the warm success of virtually every original writing talent to enter the field in recent years; how explain the jubilant reception accorded such authors who dared to strike out in new directions as—to name but a selected few out of many—Francis Iles, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes, Richard Hull, Selwyn Jepson, Mabel Seeley, Raymond Postgate? These, and many like them, are authors who have done exactly the things Mr. Stern says ought to be done—and if present information is correct the reading public is eating them up! So perhaps there is some hope after all.
II
Assuming, then, the continuance of the detective story for as long as external circumstances permit the writing and publication of any such purely recreational literature, what will be its future shape?
One of the best and keenest American fashioners of the form has stated his considered private opinion to the present writer that significant structural alterations are inevitable and overdue—though he confesses his inability to predict their nature. There is much in the past history of the genre to support such a view. The Poe-Gaboriau formula was virtually extinct when Conan Doyle came along to resurrect and reclothe it in more colorful garb. Later, when the romantic apparel supplied by Doyle had begun to wear embarrassingly thin, opportune succor arrived from such master craftsmen as R. Austin Freeman, E. C. Bentley, Dorothy Sayers, Francis Iles, S. S. Van Dine, Dashiell Hammett (only a sampling is possible), who produced in their several fashions a more naturalistic and believable type of tale, better suited to modern life. If we accept this "cycle" theory, and recollect as well that all the previous changes went unrecognized until some years after their occurrence, it is even possible that the seeds of a new movement are already present in the contemporary detective story—only none of us has the wit to perceive them!
But an equally plausible case exists for the belief, held in other quarters, that the medium has now reached its essential maturity, and that future development will chiefly take the form of intensification and improvement of the several lines now in existence, rather than the creation of new lines. Certainly it must be said for this contention that the detective story of to-day, representing as it does so many diverse styles, already possesses sufficient variety as to need no drastic alteration, in the sense that earlier styles wore themselves out and had to be supplanted. The very number of avenues now open to the writer, the liberalization of conventions, the relaxation of the old rigid molds, have all decreased the likelihood of any major new development (or so this school of thought holds) by rendering it unnecessary.
Time alone will show which line of belief is correct. Conceivably, actuality may lie somewhere between the two viewpoints.
Of the several types of the police novel now in favor, it would seem that two or three have overstayed their time, at least in their present guise.
This is probably true of the "character" detective story, so highly regarded in England in recent years. Excellent and influential as this subdivision of the genre has been, the warning signals are not lacking that it has gone about as far as it can go without leaving the boundaries of detection behind. The literacy and conviction which it has contributed (and no influence in recent years has been more salutary) will without doubt live on, but the style itself is likely to be modified into something, for instance, not far removed from the naturalistic novels of Ngaio Marsh.
On the American side of the water, the related "screwball" and "hard-boiled" schools in their extreme forms give evidence of approaching exhaustion and may be expected gradually to eventuate into some less strenuous pattern. No other example than Rex Stout's fine NERO WOLFE stories is required to prove that such a modification can be achieved both painlessly and profitably.
The "Had-I-But-Known" school of stagy feminine romantics has, of course, been dead in the minds of discriminating readers for some length of time. It is only the editors who have failed to discover the fact, and presumably the exceeding weariness of the public will reach even their ears before long!
On the other hand, we shall probably see increased activity in such experimental divisions as the stylized story and the crime tour de force; though it should be remembered that comparatively few writers can succeed in these media, so that the development can not be numerically large under any circumstances.
But all these are essentially sub-developments, sidelines, of the main issue. The major portion of all detective story writing may be expected to continue, as it always has, in the field of the "straightaway" or deductive police novel—as currently exemplified, let us say, by Ellery Queen in America and John Dickson Carr (under his two names) in England. Yet the very existence, however temporary, of the more experimental "side-line" forms will inevitably force the routine police novel into intensified effort to retain its laurels—which is all to the good. A public which has tasted exotic cookery may not object to returning to plain fare for its daily sustenance, but it will demand tastier preparation of that fare. There can be no turning back now to the slovenly writing, the banal formulas, that were considered "good enough" for the detective story a generation ago. To hold its own, the roman policier of the future will need all the artful aids utilized by the "legitimate" fiction-writer—compact, coherent plot; liveliness of style, dialogue, and characterization; literacy; humor—if it is to satisfy an increasingly intelligent and critical audience.
As for that favorite bugaboo of the professional viewers with alarm (or sometimes malice), that the detective story may some day run out of material: it should be necessary to point only to the history of the last fifty years and the manner in which a rapidly changing world has taken care of this phase of the problem. Surely, an increasingly H. G. Wellsian universe will not fail to provide the crime novel with fresh and as yet unsuspected devices and situations. Thus shall new clichés take the place of old! More seriously, readers will continue to be—let us say—readers, and to hold individual preferences, while authors will, in the manner of authors, continue to supply their wants.
Finally, to reiterate a thought touched on previously, by sheer compulsion of world events the future of the detective story may well lie in America. If this should prove to be the case, the present book can conclude its major argument on no more useful note than a plea to American publishers: to study the form seriously; to insist on at least the same standards which they require of their general fiction (and adherence to the special rules as well); to eschew cheap and shoddy craftsmanship, even at the sacrifice of immediate profit. By doing so they will, in the long view, benefit themselves no less than a vast and intelligent section of the reading public and a department of literature which has amply won its right to respect and consideration.