The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

INTRODUCTION

Twenty-five years ago, when I was a first novelist on a visit to my editor, I had the occasion to read the galley proofs of «A Catalog of Crime,» now a bible of the detective-fiction genre. My editor, who was also editing the «Catalog,» was called away to deal with another problem. The author of the «Catalog» was due to pick up his proofs, I was told. Why didn't I take a look to see if my book had made it into the volume?

I found it on page 247. The author had recommended "less routine plots" and said that "unbelievable feats of survival and retaliation by people badly wounded and haemorrhaging make the reader impatient." I checked the title page to find the author of this affront. Jacques Barzun! I knew the name: a giant of the humanities, former dean and provost of Columbia University, and author of «House of the Intellect» and other weighty books. Until then, I had no idea that he was also an eminent critic of detective fiction. In fact, I knew almost nothing about the field.

My ignorance was quickly dented. Barzun arrived to collect his galleys and sensed from my sullen expression that he hadn't approved my work. In the ensuing conversation, I first learned that the game I had been playing had rules, many of which I had violated.

The point of the anecdote is the purpose of this anthology. While the detective story is founded on rules that remain important today, the distinctly American "take" on these rules has vastly enriched the genre. When Rosemary Herbert and I determined to select stories that would trace the evolution of the American detective short story, we discovered that I was far from the first American author to break or bend the rules. My American predecessors had been early pioneers in playing the detective game on their own terms.

But nobody can deny that assumptions, traditions, and rules of the genre remain important. Just what are they?

Early detective fiction was categorised as a tale rather than as serious fiction. As Barzun tells us, Edgar Allan Foe is not only the founding father and "the complete authority" on the form but also the one who "first made the point that the regular novel and the legitimate mystery will not combine."

Why not? Because in the tradition originated by the genius of Poe, the detective story emerged as a competition between writer and reader.

It was a game intended to challenge the intellect. Although Poe himself, in «The Murders in the Rue Morgue,» did arouse awe and horror, the major preoccupation-and innovation-in this story is the introduction of the puzzle. The reader is challenged to attempt to solve it with the clues provided. In the final pages, the reader will learn if his or her solution matches that of the detective.

Given such a purpose, the reader and writer had to be playing by the same rules. Even though the rules are rather self-evident, they were formalised by Monsignor Ronald Knox in his introduction to «The Best Detective Stories of 1928.» His rendition of the rules came to be known as the 'Detective Decalogue.' Perhaps because Father Knox was known as a theologian and translator of the Bible as well as a crime writer, the rules were also referred to as the 'Ten Commandments of Detective Writing.'

The rules are technical. The writer must introduce the criminal early, produce all clues found for immediate inspection by the reader, use no more than one secret room or passageway, and eschew acts of God, unknown poisons, unaccountable intuitions, helpful accidents, and so forth. Identical twins and doubles are prohibited unless the reader is prepared for them, and having the detective himself commit the crime is specifically barred. Some rules are whimsical at best or sadly indicative of the prejudices of Knox's day. Rule V, for example, provides that "no Chinaman must figure in the story." In all, the rules confirm the fact that detective stories are a game.

It is worth noting that all but one of those 'best' detective stories in the 1928 anthology were written by British authors. It was the golden age of the classic form, and though the American Poe was considered the inventor of the form, England was where the traditional side of the genre flourished. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with Sherlock Holmes as his detective and Dr. John H. Watson as his narrator straight man, had earlier brought the detective short story to its finest flowering. And Agatha Christie polished the puzzle form, particularly in her novels, to perfection. But this volume shows that even then, things were changing in America.

As our selections show, American writers had been injecting new elements into and otherwise tinkering with Poe's classic form since the nineteenth century. Then came the 'Era of Disillusion,' which followed World War I; the cultural revolt of the 'Roaring Twenties'; the rise of organized crime and of political and police corruption, which accompanied national Prohibition; and the ensuing Great Depression. All contributed to changing the nature of American literature-with detective fiction leading the way in its recording of a distinctive American voice and its depiction of the social scene. In fact, I believe that Raymond Chandler was a greater influence on later generations of American writers-in and out of the detective genre-than was that darling of the literary establishment, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Barzun told us that the classic detective story is written by and for the educated upper-middle classes. Particularly in the British manifestation, it was typically set in upper-crust milieus. But we've chosen Susan Glaspell to demonstrate that in an American writer's hands, the story can also succeed in a remote, rural farmhouse literally in the middle of America. Glaspell's story «A Jury of Her Peers» also proves that social concerns like wife battering can be used to evoke an emotional reaction on the part of the reader, even while the puzzle element remains central.

While in Britain readers were puzzling over whodunit in stories sold at railway stations, in the United States the newspaper stands and drugstore magazine racks held detective fiction of a different sort-published in pulp magazines with garish covers and cheap prices. One of these was «Black Mask,» and one who wrote for it was a former Pinkerton private detective named Dashiell Hammett.

Like many of his fellow American producers of detective fiction, Hammett was definitely not an effete product of the upper or even solidly middle class. Neither were the settings of his stories nor the characters who populated them. He and other American crime writers during the Depression years were taking crime out of the drawing rooms of country houses and putting it back on the 'mean streets' where it was actually happening.

This is not to say that the classic form was dead or even ailing. Early examples in this volume are the work of Bret Harte and Jacques Futrelle. Harte, known for his depictions of American life in Gold Rush territory, could turn his hand to writing the quintessential Sherlockian pastiche: «The Stolen Cigar Case.» And Jacques Futrelle's «The Problem of Cell 13» obeys all the rules of the locked-room mystery with a character locked into a high-security 'death cell' in an American prison.

Meanwhile, on the novel scene, until the end of the 1930's the best-selling American author of detective fiction was S. S. Van Dine, whose super-sleuth Philo Vance is among the most thoroughgoing snobs ever to appear in fiction. Van Dine's intricate plots follow the rules of Knox's 'Decalogue' and are played out in aristocratic settings into which the reality of corrupt cops, soup lines, and American hard times never intrudes. The purpose is the puzzle. Even today, literally millions of American readers buy detective fiction principally for the classical game.

In one way or another, the puzzle remains essential to the form, as demonstrated in the variety of mutations the detective story has been generating through the twentieth century. To consider the variations, one must start at the base, with «The Murders in the Rue Morgue.» In this story, Poe gives us the model for the classic detective tale, which is still alive and thriving in various modifications. Chevalier Auguste Dupin, his sleuth, not only is, in my opinion, the first detective of detective fiction, but is white, male, of an 'excellent-indeed illustrious family,' financially independent, and an amateur. The police are inept. The crime was the model for thousands of locked-room murders, done in a setting from which it seems impossible for the killer to escape, and the solution is based on close observation of physical evidence to which the superior 'ratiocination' of Dupin is applied. And, true to Poe's disdain for the notion of democracy and the uncouth labouring class, the principal characters (except the killer) are well-bred folks. In «The Purloined Letter, «Poe produced an even purer model, moving crime into the marble halls of the aristocracy.

A century later, with the traditional form enjoying its golden age, many writers still followed Poe's pattern. Locked-room crimes continued to flourish; the murder was done in a world of manor houses, formal gardens, faithful butlers, haughty house guests, and stupid police. The blood on the Persian carpet was usually blue, and everything was divorced from reality. Into this quiet haven, the skilful writer allowed no realism to intrude. It would distract the reader from the intricate puzzle the writer was unfolding.

Properly done, such stories are perfect escape literature. Book dealers labelled them 'cozies,' and Julian Symons, British crime writer and long-time literary critic for the «Times of London,» called them 'humdrums.' Fans bought them by the millions, and still do.

In his introduction to «A Catalog of Crime,» Barzun explained what the detective story should give those readers and what it should avoid. First, he stressed that the detective story is a tale, not a novel. "The tale does not pretend to social significance nor does it probe the depth of the soul," he wrote. "The characters it presents are not persons but types, as in the Gospels: the servant, the rich man, the camel driver (now a chauffeur)." Properly done, detective fiction is a high-brow form, according to Barzun. It is escape literature for the intellectual. It should deal with the workings of human reason, not with human emotion. "To put our creed positively," said Barzun (speaking for co-author Wendell Hertig Taylor as well), "we hold with the best philosophers that a detective story should be mainly occupied with detection, and not (say) with the forgivable nervousness of a man planning to murder his wife."

That great essay was published in 1971. But three years earlier, Raymond Chandler's «The Simple Art of Murder» had been republished, including the famous introductory essay, which served as a sort of writer's declaration of independence from the strictures of the classic form. I suspect that Barzun's essay was intended, at least in part, as a counterattack against the case that Chandler made for the detective story as novel and for the myriad modifications the genre had been undergoing, particularly in America.

Fortunately for me, and for hundreds of other mystery writers attracted into the genre for the other creative possibilities it offers, an increasing number of readers came to care less about whodunit and more about character development, social problems, settings, mood, culture, and all those aspects that involve emotion and not just the intellect. With the so-called mainstream of American literature polluted by the notions of the minimalists, and literary criticism entangled in the various fads of the mid-century, writers who thought they had something to say or a story to tell discovered detective fiction as Hammett and Chandler had been writing it. The mainstream novel, lying moribund under mid-century faddism, was being crowded off the best-seller lists by crime novels and mysteries.

Many of detective fiction's new practitioners leaped into the game, as did I, happily ignorant of Knox's 'Ten Commandments' or the genre's purpose as escapism for the intellectual. Instead of turning on whodunit, the focus shifted elsewhere. Sometimes, as in Ed McBain's story «Small Homicide,» the writers were chiefly interested in why the crime had been committed, or perhaps they merely used the sleuthing to draw the reader into a world they wanted to explore.

As the stories in this volume illustrate, Americans who wrote in the detective form had been branching out in all directions. The tale had been moved out of the isolation of the privileged class and into work-a-day America, and was often drawn with an excellent eye for regional settings and a keen ear for local voices. A bit of social purpose and realism had seeped in. In the United States, the sleuthing game had never been the exclusive domain of well-bred male amateurs; more and more of the popular writers-and their sleuths-were women. An early female detective found in these pages is Violet Strange, in Anna Katharine Green's «Missing: Page Thirteen.» But until the work of Hammett in the 1930's and Raymond Chandler in the 1940's began to have its effect, the puzzle generally remained at the heart of the work. Certainly in the minds of the publishing fraternity, that was what the public wanted. But even Chandler encountered editing that sought to trim his appeal to readers' emotions. In a letter to a friend written in 1947, Chandler noted that when he was writing short stories for the pulp-magazine market, editors cut out the language he used to establish mood and emotion on the grounds that their readers wanted action, not description: "My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action, that really, although they didn't know it, the thing they cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description." As our selection «I'll Be Waiting» shows, Chandler was not interested in producing the classic form as outlined by Knox's rules. He was interested in using crime as the centre around which he could spin a novel that illuminates social decadence and the human condition.

In this volume, Rosemary Herbert and I have assembled thirty-three stories that represent the evolution of the American detective story. Because the wealth of talent over the past century and a half was so great, we found ourselves in a position reminiscent of that of professional football coaches facing the deadline for cutting their teams down to the legal limit with too many outstanding players to chose among. Just as coaches sometimes keep a player because he can serve in more than one position, we chose our stories to illustrate more than one development in the field. Rex Stout's «Christmas Party,» for example, shows Nero Wolfe unusually active for an 'armchair detective'-but it beautifully illuminates how the 'Holmes and Watson' relationship had been modified. In making another selection, we evaluated several journalist sleuths, including George Harmon Coxe's photojournalist Flashgun Casey, but we picked Joe 'Daffy' Dill for this volume because we found Richard Sale's story «A Nose for News «irresistibly entertaining.

Our goal was to illustrate as many aspects of the American detective short story as we could. Thus we present examples of sleuth types, including amateurs like Poe's Dupin, 'scientific sleuths' like Futrelle's Professor S. F. X. Van Dusen and Arthur B. Reeve's Professor Craig Kennedy, hard-boiled dicks like Robert Leslie Bellem's Dan Turner, and police characters like Ed McBain's Eighty-seventh Precinct cop Dave Levine and my own Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. We also feature 'accidental sleuths'-characters who happen upon a crime and manage to discover the truth-as do the characters in Glaspell's «A Jury of Her Peers» and Mary Roberts Rinehart's «The Lipstick.» And Mignon G. Eberhart's Susan Dare, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, and Linda Barnes's Carlotta Carlyle join Green's Violet Strange as female private investigators. Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner and William Faulkner's Uncle Gavin Stevens are sermonising sleuths who grind moral axes until they shine, while Clayton Rawson's The Great Merlini adds sparkle to his sleuthing by means of his practical expertise in magic.

Stories that succeed in presenting examples of sleuth types also demonstrate regionalism, for which American detective fiction has become known. The works of Glaspell, Post, Bellem, and Faulkner portray distinctly American scenes, as does my own short story «Chee's Witch,» which illustrates the move into the use of ethnic detectives.

Although our table of contents includes the names of a good number of famous authors, we were more concerned to find the best story to represent a trend in the genre. Some of our selections are classics; some represent little-known writers whom we consider 'good finds' for readers. For example, we considered Clinton H. Stagg's «The Keyboard of Silence» delightful and included it as a gem that deserves to be better known, and not only because Stagg's blind sleuth demonstrates how disabled detectives can function efficiently.

While we represent as many decades as possible, and male and female sleuths and authors, we also chose our selections to show emotional range. We cover humour with Harte and Barnes, pathos with Glaspell and McBain. And we are sure that readers will have fun with Reeve's «The Beauty Mask,» in which the scientific jiggery-pokery is so dated that readers will find themselves chuckling even while being taken in by the earnestness with which it was written.

I join with Rosemary Herbert in the belief that we have fairly represented the evolution of the detective story in America. But our mission was to entertain as well as to educate. We trust that you will find this volume just plain fun to read.

Tony Hillerman, with Rosemary Herbert