‘Everybody is suspected in turn, and the streets are full of lurking agents whose allegiances we cannot know. Nobody seems guiltless, nobody seems safe; and then, suddenly, the murderer is spotted, and – relief! – he is not, after all, a person like you or me. He is a villain – known to the trade as George Gruesome – and he has been caught by an infallible Power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly where to fix the guilt.’
Edmund Wilson, ‘Why do people read detective stories?’, The New Yorker, 1944
‘ “Do you see any clue?”
(Sherlock Holmes) “You have furnished me with seven, but of course I must test them before I can pronounce upon their value.”
“You suspect someone?”
(Holmes) “I suspect myself – ”
“What?”’
The Naval Treaty by Arthur Conan Doyle
One particularly fascinating consequence of the psychological revolution in the way stories are told over the past two centuries is the way it has given rise to a wholly new type of plot. Furthermore, it is one which has provided the modern world with one of its most popular forms of storytelling.
The essence of a story based on the Mystery is that it begins by posing a riddle, usually through the revelation that some baffling crime has been committed. Our interest then centres round the efforts of its central figure to unravel this riddle, as by tracking down the identity of the person responsible for the crime. Obviously this has found its most familiar expression in detective stories, ever since these were first developed by such nineteenth-century writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle.
Stories which centre on a ‘detective’ working out who was responsible for a crime go very much further back in history than the nineteenth century. The two earliest recorded examples appear in the Apocrypha, the semi-unauthorised appendix to the Old Testament. The History of Susanna and Bel and the Dragon have been ascribed to the first or second centuries BC. The first of these tells of how a pure and beautiful young married woman, Susanna, went privately into her garden to bathe, naked. Two judges, eminently respectable old men, have secretly been spying on her and become ‘inflamed with lust’. They confront Susanna with an ultimatum. Unless she agrees to ‘lie with them’, they will tell the authorities that they have seen her committing adultery in the garden with a young man, a crime for which she would be punished by death. Susanna views accepting their proposition as a fate worse than death. The vengeful old men therefore make their false report. Everyone, including her husband, is appalled, and she is put on trial for her life. Because the two judges are such respected citizens, the case against her seems unanswerable.
Susanna is about to be sentenced to death when the young hero, Daniel, speaks up, asking for the chance to cross-examine the two accusers separately. He asks each of them just one question: under which tree in the garden did they see Susanna committing her crime? The first confidently answers ‘a mastick tree’. When the other is brought in he says ‘an oak tree’. The two ‘monsters’ are thus caught out on their blind spot, by their conflicting evidence, and are sentenced to death in Susanna’s place. Daniel, the self-appointed ‘detective’ (or counsel for the defence), wins universal acclaim and from that day forth ‘was held in great reputation in the sight of the people’.
By the time of Bel and the Dragon Daniel has risen to become a respected adviser to the greatest ruler of the age, King Cyrus of Babylon. But they fall out, because Daniel, a Jew, refuses to worship the Babylonian god Bel, or Baal. In the city’s main temple stands a huge brass image of Bel, and every day a great heap of sacrifices is laid before it: forty sheep, masses of flour, quantities of wine. Regularly each night they disappear, which to the king proves infallibly that Bel is a true, living god. But Daniel only smiles and tells the king he must not be deceived. Cyrus loses his temper and threatens Daniel that, unless he can prove that the god does not eat the food, he will be put to death. Daniel goes to the temple with the king to present the daily offering but, before the door is sealed, he arranges for the floor to be sprinkled with ashes. When, next morning, they return, the king points triumphantly to the evidence that all the food has gone. Daniel invites him to look carefully at the floor. The ashes show the footprints of many men, women and children. The priests of Bel and their families have been creeping in during the night through a secret door, to steal the food. The king orders that those who have deceived him should be put to death and that the statue of Bel should be destroyed. Again Daniel has overcome the ‘monster’.
These two tales already include several devices which were to become only too familiar in later detective stories. In particular, there is the figure of the calmly confident, all-seeing detective who has worked out how the crime was committed long before anyone else in the story. Almost equally familiar, of course, was to become the way the finger of suspicion is initially pointed at someone who is innocent, until the detective eventually reveals the true culprit. But there is one crucial difference between these stories and the whodunnits of modern times. For the reader there is no mystery. Right from the start we, the audience, are let in on how the crime was committed, by whom and why: whereas in the modern versions, the true ‘Mystery’, the whole point is that we do not know these things until they are finally revealed to us and everyone else by that all-seeing detective.
The writer normally credited with having written the first modern detective story was Edgar Allan Poe, for his The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841. In fact the earliest example of a detective story based on the Mystery plot had already appeared two decades earlier, as one of the tales of the celebrated German early-Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann. His Fraulein de Scudery was published as one of the Serapionsbrüder between 1819 and 1821. Hoffmann’s story is set in Paris in the reign of Louis XIV, and opens with the arrival at midnight of a mysterious, distraught young man at the house of the venerable Mlle de Scudery, a favourite of the king. He wants the great lady to accept a casket. But the servant is reluctant to let him in because all Paris has recently been shocked and terrified by a series of horrible murders, They all involve the theft of jewellery made by the most celebrated goldsmith of the day, René Cardillac.
The police, under Desgrais, are at their wits end. Several times a murder has even been witnessed, but each time the murderer has seemed just to melt away into the wall of a house, to the point where it is popularly believed that only the devil himself could be responsible. The plot which follows is complex, just as the mystery behind the thefts and murders remains complete, until the story approaches its climax. This begins when Cardillac, the universally respected jeweller, is himself found murdered, in the presence of his apprentice Olivier Brusson, who is also in love with Cardillac’s pure and beautiful daughter, Madélon. Since everything seems to point to Brusson as the murderer, he is arrested. But then Madélon comes to Mlle de Scudery, pleading her lover’s innocence. From this moment, the shrewd old lady assumes a detective-like role, as she seeks to unravel the truth of this murky business (thus becoming the prototype for Agatha Christie’s spinster-detective Miss Marple). Furthermore, in a fashion which was to become familiar from countless later detective stories, as where Sherlock Holmes was always several jumps ahead of Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, she does this in defiance of Degrais and the police, who persist in their conviction that Brusson is guilty and cannot wait to hurry him to the scaffold.
The horrifying truth the old lady finally uncovers is that the serial-killer responsible for all the murders around Paris had been none other than Cardillac himself. Like Dr Jekyll, the respectable jeweller had developed a dark Alter-Ego, emerging at night like Mr Hyde to commit these fearful crimes. As for his own killer, it turns out the culprit was not Bresson but a captain of the royal guard, who had identified the murderer but wanted to keep his own identity secret. Eventually he comes forward to explain. All is resolved, the hapless Brusson is released to marry the lovely Madélon, and the happy pair go off to start their new life together in another land.
Although Mlle de Scudery’s solution of this mystery depends more on a fortuitous series of confessions than on her interpretation of clues, in other respects this story might have provided a model for the vast majority of detective stories which have appeared since. Above all, it is a crucial part of such stories that, as in the tale of Susanna, the suspicions of the authorities should initially be directed at someone who is innocent; and then that the detective should be the only character shrewd enough to ‘see whole’ in identifying the true criminal.
This was the plot made famous 20 years later by Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which was almost certainly inspired by Hoffmann’s tale. The story is narrated by a kind of Doctor Watson-figure, whose role is to be an admiring foil to the genius of his friend Dupuin, the detective. The story begins with a dazzling demonstration of Dupuin’s uncanny ability to reconstruct his friend’s train of thought as they are strolling through the streets of Paris. The city is then shocked by the discovery of a woman and her daughter having been battered to death and mutilated in a sealed room. The police arrest a young man called Le Bon (his name somewhat crudely signalling that he is ‘good’, therefore innocent). Dupuin eventually works out from the positioning of finger-marks on the two dead women that the killer cannot have been human, and must have been a giant ape, an orangoutan. Sure enough, precisely such a creature is found to have escaped in the city.
By the 1860s detective stories were becoming particularly fashionable in England, their first leading exponent being Wilkie Collins, notably in The Moonstone (1868) in which the detective is for the first time a policeman, Sergeant Cuff. His other best-known novel The Woman in White (1860) is also based on the Mystery plot, although it is not strictly a detective story.1 Collins’s friend Dickens used the plot in his last, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). In 1887 a young Scottish doctor, Arthur Conan Doyle, published A Study in Scarlet, introducing the most famous fictional detective of them all, Sherlock Holmes; and in the 60 Holmes stories he was to publish over the following decades he finally established the genre which in the twentieth century was to find countless practitioners, from Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and G. K. Chesterton to the Belgian writer Simenon and their American contemporaries such as Raymond Chandler.
As we see from The Woman in White, it is not only the more obvious type of detective story which can be based on the Mystery plot. It also, for instance, gives rise to a certain type of ghost story, where the mystery centres on tracking down the explanation for some ghostly apparition. But again this usually involves some past tragedy or crime, as in M. R. James’s The Haunted Dolls’ House (1925), written for the library of the Royal dolls’ house. A collector buys a beautifully-made antique model of a country house, complete with a set of miniature human figures, and sets it up in his bedroom. He is awakened in the night by the chiming of a mysterious clock, and sees the dolls’ house illuminated as if by moonlight. He then witnesses the unfolding of a ghostly drama, in which the figures in the house commit three murders. Amazed by this apparition, he tries to uncover some historical explanation for these strange events. Eventually he discovers the story of a long-demolished house, in which precisely such a baffling sequence of murders had taken place in the eighteenth century. But only now, two centuries later, have the true identities of the murderers come to light.
One well-known but very different type of story based on the Mystery plot was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), The riddle is posed in the film’s opening scene when, in a huge and fantastic Californian castle called Xanadu, we see the death of the fabulously rich Charles Foster Kane, owner of a vast newspaper and industrial empire. With his dying breath, he utters the single word ‘Rosebud’. A young journalist is so intrigued by this detail, which he senses may contain the clue to Kane’s mysterious life, that he sets out to discover what ‘Rosebud’ may have meant. The framework of the story is provided by the course of his investigation, but within this frame we see the journalist reconstructing Kane’s entire life, from the day many years before when a stuffy, self-important lawyer had arrived in falling snow at the humble, remote log cabin where Charles lived as a little boy with his mother, to announce that the boy has been left an immense fortune. Young Charles is playing happily outside in the snow with his friends and is summoned inside, leaving behind his sledge, to be told that the lawyer is now his guardian and will be taking him off to begin a new life as the heir to millions. He is heartbroken to be torn away from his mother and his loving, simple home.
We then follow Kane’s astonishing career as he grows up. As a young man he discovers that part of the vast commercial empire he has inherited includes an ailing newspaper, which he decides to edit himself. To the horror of his guardian, Kane transforms it, through muckraking journalism and by buying up all the best journalists of the day, into the most successful newspaper in America. He makes an eminently respectable, unloving marriage to a Senator’s daughter, for once approved by his sternly moralistic guardian. He buys more newspapers, becomes ever richer and embarks on a political career which everyone assumes will end in the White House. But in the middle of his first dazzling campaign (when the Dream Stage of his story is at its height), he one night meets in the street a poor, naïve, vulgar young girl, Susan, who has dreams of becoming a professional singer. He becomes infatuated, his political opponents discover his ‘secret love nest’ and blow it up into a huge scandal, and his political career is in ruins.
Now the pattern of Tragedy is firmly in the ascendant, as Kane divorces his hard, respectable wife, marries the pitiful young Susan and uses his millions in a bid to launch her as an opera singer (hiring a grand opera house and boosting her through his newspapers). She is an appalling, embarrassing flop and takes to drink. Kane immures her in his vast, remote castle, stuffed with so many works of art shipped in from Europe that many have never even been removed from their crates. On the public stage, he cuts an increasingly impotent, absurd figure, richer than ever, but quite unable to exercise any influence on political events, as he wishes. Finally, pathetic, lonely and prematurely aged, he dies, uttering the mysterious word ‘Rosebud’; as his fingers let slip a cheap glass paperweight showing a snowstorm, which falls to the floor and shatters.
At the end of his quest, the journalist who has pieced all this story together, still utterly baffled by ‘Rosebud’, comes to the castle in a last desperate search for clues. He sees an army of workmen sorting through Kane’s mountains of possessions and throwing huge quantities of rubbish into a furnace. Among the debris is a child’s toboggan and, as it is thrown into the fire, the licking flames illumine the name written on it, ‘Rosebud’. The journalist does not even see it. But for us, the audience, the mystery is at last solved. The inner tragedy of Kane’s life had begun at that moment when, all those years before, he had been torn away from his happy childish games in the snow and from the softness and love of his mother, to be propelled into the hard, alien, outside world, dominated by the ‘masculine’ ego-values of money, respectability, power and fame. ‘Rosebud’ was his soul, the secret heart of the identity he had lost, that he was still hankering for with his dying breath. It symbolised his lost inner feminine, everything the doomed love he had projected onto the little infantile anima-figure of Susan, with her vague ‘artistic’ dreams, had been a last, pitiful attempt to recapture; but which had signalled instead only the onset of his inner ruin, so that he ended like the hero of a dark Rebirth story, trapped in unseeing egotism with no hope of redemption.2
The real point of the Mystery story, and what distinguishes it from every other type of story we have looked at in this book, is that the hero – the detective or investigator – is in a peculiar way not directly involved in the central drama of the story. He or she stands outside it, as a kind of voyeur, only intervening, if at all, as a detached, superior deus ex machina to sort out what has happened.
In fact, when we examine such stories more carefully, we see that the drama the investigator is observing, like a spectator contemplating a picture or play, is invariably shaped by one of the basic plots we have already looked at, as Citizen Kane is shaped by the five-stage plot of Tragedy. In the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, for instance, most begin with the great detective sitting in his cosy Baker Street lodgings. Then some distraught figure intrudes from the outside world, to relate how he or she has been caught up in a terrible drama. The wise, all-seeing Holmes agrees to address his almost supernatural powers to solving the mystery. He eventually unravels the riddle, the shadows are lifted from his distraught client, who expresses undying gratitude, and Holmes returns to his lodgings to smoke his pipe, read the newspaper and await the next case.
The drama in which his clients are caught up always turns out to assume the shape of another plot. It may be an Overcoming the Monster story, as in The Speckled Band, where Holmes in fact plays a more than usually central role as the hero who personally overcomes the monster. The distraught client is a young girl, an heiress, who feels threatened by the grim, violent figure of her stepfather, Dr Grimesby Roylott, with whom she lives in the country. Two years earlier her older sister had died in violent and mysterious circumstances in the same house. Holmes inspects the house, in the doctor’s absence, and works out how the sister must have been murdered and how his client is now in danger of the same fate. Of course we, the readers, are not told what he has deduced, since this would destroy the suspense. Holmes then secretly returns to the house at night, and in the nick of time manages to send the agent of murder, a deadly snake, back on its tracks up a bell rope and through a specially-contrived hole in the wall to the next room from which it has come. Here it fastens its deadly fangs in the villain who sent it, Dr Roylott, who is after the girl’s money. The monster is thus overcome, the beautiful young heroine has been saved; and if this were the usual Overcoming the Monster story we might then expect the brave hero to marry the ‘Princess’ he has rescued. But here we expect nothing of the kind. The heroine passes out of Holmes’s life and he returns to his lodgings quite unchanged by his adventure.
No Holmes adventure is based more overtly on the Overcoming the Monster plot than the novel with which Doyle marked his detective’s return to life 11 years after he supposedly fell to his death with Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls. The suspense of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) is built up through Doyle’s conjuring up the image of a gigantic, luminescent and ‘monstrous hound’, seemingly supernatural, which roams a fog-wreathed Dartmoor at night and is associated with the mysterious death of a local landowner. Holmes deduces that the ‘monster’ is not a ghost but a real dog, being used to further a series of crimes, the perpetrator of which he identifies. The climax comes when he manages to shoot the monster, just before its fleeing master is sucked down to his death by a bog (adapting an image borrowed from the climactic episode of R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone 33 years earlier, when the villain was sucked down to his death in a similar quagmire on Exmoor).
Within the framework of the Mystery, however, other Holmes stories are based on different plots. The Musgrave Ritual takes on the shape of a Quest, ending in the discovery at the bottom of a pond of a great treasure, the ancient crown of England. The Boscombe Valley Mystery turns out to be shaped by the plot of Comedy, where the dark figures are two fathers, locked in a deadly quarrel, while their two children long to get married but are prevented from doing so by their fathers’ feud. One father murders the other, so that suspicion at first falls on the innocent son, which is what brings in Holmes to investigate. The result of his intervention is that the ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’ are at last liberated from the shadows and free to get married. But by this time, Holmes has long since returned to Baker Street, to await his next case.
It is this curiously detached role played by the central figure in the Mystery, and his lack of real human involvement with the other characters who pass temporarily under his scrutiny, which really gives us the central clue to what these stories are about.
It is significant that most Mystery stories are concerned with discovering who has been responsible for committing some terrible crime. A great deal of storytelling is concerned in one way or another with the committing of crimes. Although we usually reserve the title of ‘murder story’ for mysteries or ‘whodunnits’, much of the great literature of the world is made up of stories in which murders are committed: from the Oresteia to Jack and the Beanstalk, from Aladdin to the tragedies of Shakespeare and the four major novels of Dostoyevsky. But rarely in such stories is there any doubt about who has committed the murder. What they are concerned with is the deeper moral circumstances and consequences of the crime for those involved. Is the killing justified? Will the criminal face up to his guilt? Will he have to pay the price with his own death? Will he go through a change of heart and a period of intense suffering and repentance, so that he can eventually be released?
The difference between these sorts of story and the ‘whodunnit’ is that the latter is not concerned with such complex issues. It derives its entire appeal from the simple trick of initially hiding the identity of the culprit and then at the end revealing it. We are not really concerned with the finer points of morality involved, or with the other characters acting out the story. They are primarily there just to present us with the basic materials for yet another demonstration of the hero-detective’s extraordinary mental powers. And the real point about this figure with whom we identify as the focus of our attention, is that the person who has committed the crime is always someone other than himself. In following the story, we can invariably rest in the comfortable certainty that it will be someone other than the person we are identifying with on whom the guilt will eventually be pinned.
So much do we take this for granted, since it is the whole point of the formula which has given such pleasure to readers since the rise of the modern detective story, that we may see nothing odd about it.
But let us then consider the greatest ‘whodunnit’ in all literature: a story shaped round the efforts of its central figure to discover who has committed a crime so terrible that it is nothing less than the murder of a king. When we meet the hero, King Oedipus, a fearful curse has fallen on his country, and he is told that it will not be lifted until he has discovered the identity of the man who murdered his predecessor, King Laius. Oedipus sets out, as detective, to unravel this mystery, which of course is only a mystery to him, not to us. He uncovers clue after clue until he is finally brought up against the inexorable realisation that the king’s murderer was none other than himself; and, what makes it worse, that the man he killed was none other than his own father.
It is this which places Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos (which we shall analyse fully in the next chapter) on an infinitely more serious level than any of the other types of ‘whodunnit’ we have been considering. Instead of just sitting vicarously on the sidelines, cosily identifying with some central figure – Sherlock Holmes, Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot – who again and again manages to pin the blame for a crime on someone else, as if by some mechanical formula, we are thrust up against the spectacle of a man going through one of the most profound and uncomfortable experiences any human being can know: having to face up at last to the dark side of his own nature and to recognise his own, irrevocable guilt.
Herein lies the central clue as to why we must consider the modern detective story, and the plot of the Mystery, as in a different category from any other type of story we have looked at in this book. Herein also we may find the reason why even the most devoted readers of detective thrillers often find them ultimately unsatisfying, with a curious sense of flatness each time one of their stories finally reaches its conclusion.
When in 1944 Edmund Wilson famously wrote three critical articles about the passion for detective stories in The New Yorker, he was startled by the virulence of the response he received from those who rushed to defend them. What particularly struck him was how these readers seemed to be addicted to detective fiction, as if to a drug, yet seemed to find it remarkably difficult to explain why they liked it so much. One of Wilson’s central observations, in his essay ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’, was how banal, in strictly literary terms, is the style in which most detective stories are written. The characters are just two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, manipulated round a board to serve the story’s central purpose, which is to set up what is usually some wholly artificial, improbable puzzle for the detective to solve. Once this conundrum has been solved, or its answer revealed, the story and its characters are of no further interest; any more than is a crossword puzzle once the last clue has been filled in.
The point of detective stories is that they derive from that part of the human psyche, the ordering function of the mind, when this becomes split off from those feminine principles of feeling and intuitive understanding which can connect it to the reality of the living world. It then operates on the level of a fantasy or daydream. This is why such stories are so beguiling to those who, unlike Edmund Wilson, are susceptible to their charms. They create a neat little make-believe world, hermetically sealed from reality, in which the ordering function can set up its riddles, simply by the trick of withholding the information the reader needs to solve the riddle until the author is ready to reveal it. Such is the fantasy realm into which we, the readers, can then have the pleasure of escaping. We first enjoy the frisson of seeing some peaceful, ordered little ‘kingdom’, such as a traditional English village, a country house or an Oxford college, being upset by a dark and mysterious irruption of evil. We then enjoy the reassuring spectacle of the all-seeing detective moving inexorably, clue by clue, towards the point where the cause of this disorder can safely be pinned on some villainous figure who never really belonged to such a respectable, law-abiding world in the first place. We finally see law and order restored, much as in a story where the values of the Self have eventually triumphed. Except that here the genuine state of all-resolving wholeness represented by the Self plays no part.
The drama has been conceived on that same sentimental level we have seen giving rise to other types of story, where the ego can fantasise about enjoying the rewards of the Self without having to go through the deeper processes required to achieve it. The detective figure is a particular projection of the human ego, or ‘super-ego’, whose exhibitionistic display of rational intelligence is made morally acceptable because it is serving the wider purpose of ensuring that darkness is exposed and light is victorious. Just as James Bond’s indulgence in sex and violence is sanctioned by the fact that he is defending ‘our side’ against some wicked super-villain, so Sherlock Holmes’s outrageous assumption of intellectual superiority (not to mention his indulgence in cocaine) appears entirely acceptable, because he is using it to expose evil in the name of law, order and truth. We the readers can thus share vicariously in the sight of him showing off in this way, knowing it is all in a higher, righteous cause. And what gives us even more a sense of shared superiority in identifying with the all-seeing central figure in detective stories is that he is always surrounded by those other characters, such as the dimwitted police, who expose the inferiority of their intelligence by invariably jumping to the wrong conclusions. The role of the Watson-figure in acting as a bumbling foil to the detective’s brilliance is similarly to reinforce this sense of our hero’s awesomely superhuman powers.
All this may seem as harmless a form of self-indulgence as completing a crossword puzzle. But so little does the unravelling of these self-referential conundrums have to do with the real world, and so much do they rely on the endless recycling of the same set of stereotypes, that there are really only two ways in which the authors of such stories can maintain the illusion of originality necessary to keep their audience’s interest alive. The first is through the skill by which they turn their heroes into sufficiently distinctive two-dimensional characters, defined by their quirky habits and catch-phrases; the game at which Conan Doyle in creating Holmes was the supreme master. The other is through the ingenuity with which they can find new intellectual twists to what is essentially such a limited and repetitive formula. This was one reason why Agatha Christie was so successful, in that she managed to come up with one permutation on the basic formula after another: ranging from a story in which every one of the many possible suspects turns out to be equally guilty (Murder on the Orient Express) to that in which the culprit turns out to be the story’s narrator and the detective’s own Watson-like confidant (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd).
In a sense the most ingenious twist of all, however, was that used by Agatha Christie in what was to become, in commercial terms, the most successful version of a detective story ever put on the stage. Was it entirely coincidental that this should have been the only example of a modern ‘whodunnit’ where the person who committed the crime turns out to have been the detective himself? The Mousetrap may have no pretensions to psychological profundity or to be considered as great literature. But is it possible that, in this unique twist to the formula, the millions of theatregoers who helped to make it the longest-running stage production in history should have done so because they caught in it just the faintest echo of one of the most profound issues which lie at the heart of storytelling: the real drama implicit in a man discovering not someone else’s guilt, which is easy, but his own?3