Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies
The Policeman and the Detective in a Detective Story: A Brief History
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2.11The Policeman and the Detective in a Detective Story: A Brief HistoryLiterary works including some of the ingredients of detective fiction, for instance a puzzle and a crime, have been written for centuries. According to P. D. James, traces of the genre can be found in pieces as diverse as the Bible, Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Jane Austen’s Emma (“Introduction”). These texts, however, do not primarily consider the investigation and detection and for Julian Symons “those who search for fragments of detection in the Bible and Herodotus are looking only for puzzles” (23). Besides, Pittard doubts whether crime literature published before 1800, which pictured the villain as a sympathetic character, can be seen as detective fiction, and for some it remains a question whether it is possible to speak about detective fiction before formal police and detective departments had been established (Symons 23). Consequently, it is generally accepted that the first real detective fiction story was written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 when he published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Collins). In this and the four stories that followed Poe introduced the basic features of detective fiction, for instance the locked-room mystery, the wrongly suspected person and the least suspected person as the culprit (Marling), which, in Symons’s terms, makes him “the undisputed father of the detective story” (33). He also created an amateur detective, Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, who helps the baffled police and by reasoning and careful consideration of details comes to the solution of the mystery. Poe also started the tradition of a slow-witted companion to the brilliant detective who tells the story and asks the questions an average reader might want to ask. This pattern was then repeated for another one hundred years. It has been widely discussed which book should be given the title of the first detective novel. P. D. James and others argue that this title belongs to The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (TDF 23) published in 1868. In this novel Collins laid down the basic principles of the detective novels and created one of the first professional detectives, Sergeant Cuff (James, TDF 25). This character, similarly to Dickens’s Inspector Bucket, was based on a real-life Scotland-Yard detective, Inspector Whicher, “the Prince of Detectives” (Symons 52). Whicher’s successful career suffered serious drawbacks after he failed in two cases and according to Symons, Collins might have had his rehabilitation in mind when he created his character (52). Dickens and Collins represent the trend of celebrating the police and the detectives in particular. Literature celebrating the criminal almost disappeared and the sympathetic criminal hero and a stupid policeman continued to be found almost exclusively in the penny dreadful (Symons 46). However, at the end of the century the Great (amateur) Detective robbed the police of some of their fame. The greatest of the Great Detectives, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, is notorious for his disregard and contempt for the police. According to Rennison, it may result from the fact that the late 1870s were stigmatized by a great scandal in the Detective Department and the Trial of the Detectives in which corruption and a complex fraud were investigated (40). By the end of the trial most of the older officers had left the force but it took Holmes some time to “shake off the belief that the force was manned almost exclusively by the incompetent, the unimaginative and the potentially corrupt” (Rennison 41). Consequently, Holmes is more than sceptical about Inspector Lestrade’s skills. Holmes accuses Lestrade of a complete lack of imagination, initiative and reason but on the other hand he acknowledges his tenacity (Rennison 42). Lestrade is aware of his inferiority and the contrast between his “plodding intelligence and Holmes’s genius” (Rennison 42), and their relationship suffers from resulting distance and Lestrade’s patronizing attitude to Holmes. It is only later, as Rennison concludes, when their relationship can be described as friendship. The appeal of the Great Detective lies in his assumed superiority. He is the embodiment of the superior man and the hero who saves the society from evil. He is the romantic knight whose superiority must not be threatened by intelligence greater than his, less so from a police officer. Nevertheless, the confidence in police work was growing during the nineteenth century and the official detectives were generally held in respect, by the middle class in particular. The detective story reflects this trend and although it may depict some slow-witted constables, “the professional detective […] no longer appears in fiction as the corrupt oppressor, but as the protector of the innocent” (Symons 58). According to Symons, this view is later challenged by the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, by Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler in particular (58), but it is supported by the representation of the police in the detective story of the Golden Age, as is shown in the following chapters. 3Golden-Age Detective Fiction and Its Policemen3.1Golden-Age Detective Fiction and Its PrinciplesThe Golden Age of detective fiction, which roughly corresponds to the period between the two world wars or, according to Sally Munt, to the period from the first novel of Agatha Christie (1920) and the last novel by Dorothy L. Sayers (1937) (Munt 6), witnessed canonization of women crime writers, growing popularity of the genre and both its development and standardization of rules and principles. Golden-Age detective fiction was escapist literature that was supposed to help “escape from the monotony of modern life” (Trodd 134). But it also played a major role in healing the nation wounded in the First World War and in reassuring the English that the world was an orderly place where evil could be beaten and peace restored. For Munt it is the “literature of convalescence: the bloodless, detached, dispassionate, domestic murder […] which soothed and reassured” (8). Golden Age crime writers usually turn a blind eye to social problems, unemployment, increasing costs of living and the forthcoming economic crisis. “In the British stories the General Strike of 1926 never took place, trade unions did not exist, and when sympathy was expressed for the poor it was not for the unemployed but for those struggling on a fixed inherited income” (Symons 108). Most writers were not interested in criticizing the outer world; they sought to entertain and puzzle their readers (James, TDF 23). Although most of the stories are concerned with at least one violent death, they are stories of entertainment and in the end “all will be well – except of course for the murderer, but he deserves all that’s coming to him” (James, TDF 66). The reader is not supposed to muse over the actual ending, which meant hanging then, but to enjoy the restoration of peace and order. Though the peaceful rural setting of most Golden Age detective stories may seem fantastic to the modern reader, P. D. James emphasizes that for the middle-class writers it was the reality. In her view, England of the Golden Age was a “cohesive world, overwhelmingly white and united by a common belief in a religious and moral code […] and buttressed by social and political institutions which, […], attracted general allegiance. […] It was an ordered society in which virtue was regarded as normal, crime an aberration, and in which there was small sympathy for the criminal” (TDF 70). The established institutions might have been criticised and the attitude to the criminal system and the police may have seemed ambiguous, yet their role and importance were not seriously questioned. Obtuse policemen were contrasted with the brilliant private detectives and from time to time they were ridiculed, but never despised. Or were they?
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