INSPIRED BY THE MOONSTONE

The detective novel, one of the most popular genres of modern fiction, was catapulted into prominence by Wilkie Collins’s remarkable narrative The Moonstone. Collins’s work displays several characteristics that became staples of detective fiction during the century and a half following its initial triumphant reception: an opener that presents a seemingly perfect and unsolvable crime; the erroneous accusation of one or more innocent characters, backed up by highly plausible superficial evidence; inferior policemen or detectives who bungle matters; more competent personnel who come in to rescue the case—plus red herrings, misleading information, and a host of shady characters. Collins’s template, often followed to the letter by later mystery writers, typically leads to a marvelously dramatic denouement and the ingenious explanation of the crime.

Collins’s detective novel genre is distinguished from the shorter detective story, inaugurated by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” ( 1841 ) and taken to new heights of fame by the Sherlock Holmes tales of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the first of which appeared in 1887. The best work of Collins and such later detective fiction masters as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler is their novels (though Sayers and Chandler in particular had considerable success with their detective stories as well). The novel allows more time for drawing out the suspense and amassing details and clues before the mystery is solved.

Public taste for the detective novel increased after World War I. Englishwoman Agatha Christie (1890-1976) created two of the best-loved leading characters in the history of detective fiction: the logical Belgian Hercule Poirot and the elderly English spinster Miss Marple. Christie’s sixty-six detective novels, published starting in 1920, are elegantly constructed and challenge audiences while consistently fooling them. Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) wrote eleven detective novels and twenty-one stories. Famous for their leading man, the capricious amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s novels are models of humor, characterization, and plotting. Murder Must Advertise (1933) and The Nine Tailors (1934) are two of her best works. Sayers, with Christie and two other English writers, G. K. Chesterton and Ronald Knox, founded the Detection Club in 1929; its members wrote composite novels including The Floating Admiral (1931) and Double Death (1939).

In America, Dashiell Hammett (1894—1961) pioneered the “hard-boiled” detective novel, which favors gritty, realistic scenarios featuring seedy locales, hardened criminals, and tough detectives, quite unlike the more genteel settings and characters of England’s writers. Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon (1930) introduced the world to detective Sam Spade, who was further popularized by the 1941 film starring Humphrey Bogart; indeed, the film noir style popular in the 1930s and 1940s was closely allied with this new style of detective writing. Another major author of hard-boiled fiction, Raymond Chandler (1888—1959), achieved his greatest success with The Big Sleep (1939); the 1946 film version also starred Bogart. Chandler’s cool, shrewd, loner detective Philip Marlowe drew the admiration of poet W H. Auden, who thought that Chandler’s “powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.”