cambridge-crime-fiction

martin priestman
small-scale, intimate crimes at the heart of modern middle- and upper-class
homes. By a relatively small re-emphasis, The Moonstone shifts the focus
from the crime itself – which turns out barely to be one – to its investigation.
However, though regularly hailed as the first great English detective
hero, the able but thwarted Sergeant Cuff is dismissed from the case after
wrongly accusing the heroine, and his place taken by a doctor’s assistant
whose detective credentials are limited to his inside knowledge of the workings
of opium. The figure of the detective-hero who unravels a crime singlehanded
through a mixture of persistence and ingenious deduction is in fact
better represented in Robert Audley, who uncovers his young aunt’s nearmurder
of her inconvenient first husband in what is normally listed as the
purest of ‘Sensation novels’, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret
(1862).
With Doyle’s creation of the Sherlock Holmes series, detective fiction became
for the first time an indubitably popular and repeatable genre format. It
now knows what it is and what it is trying to do, as does its public; and while
there is a simultaneous burgeoning of many other popular crime-related formulae,
it becomes a respectably full-time job to analyse the numerous variants
of this one. Martin A. Kayman explores some of these variants, but also
some of the other kinds of short narrative from which they emerge, such
as the supposedly true-life memoirs of the police detective ‘Waters’ (1849)
which, while not conforming to the later ‘rules’ of whodunnitry, helped to
build up public identification with the still partly distrusted figure of the
detective policeman, and hence with the process of detection itself.
The emergence of a new kind of slimmed-down, highly goal-directed detective
novel in the so-called ‘Golden Age’ between the two world wars is
also a demonstrable fact once a few significant antecedents are acknowledged
(including some of the French ones noted in Sita A. Schütt’s chapter).
However, the common assumption that this form flourished only in Britain
while post-Poe American detection still waited to be born is one of many
oversimplifications corrected by Stephen Knight, in a chapter which also
draws attention to the way in which this period’s penchant for drawing up
lists of ‘rules’ for the genre has bedevilled later attempts to discuss crime fiction
in the round. As background to Dennis Porter’s chapter on the American
private-eye fiction of Hammett, Chandler and others from the late 1920s on,
we need to note the formative importance of such ‘Golden Age’ American
writers as S. S. Van Dine, as well as the great popularity – from at least
the 1880s –ofthe dime novels featuring Nick Carter and other such quasidetective
heroes, and the parallel growth (as traced in David Glover’s chapter
on the Thriller) of crime narratives where detection is not the chief or only
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