Thomas Kyd

• Born: November 6, 1558 (baptized)
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: August 1, 1594
• Place of death: London, England

Types of Plot: Hard-boiled; police procedural

Principal Series: Sam Phelan, 1946-1948

Contribution

Thomas Kyd’s is a transitional type of detective fiction. His Sam Phelan shares some attributes with earlier detectives and differs somewhat from the typical police detective of later crime fiction. Although Phelan’s investigations are among the earliest fictional ones that make use of the expertise of professional cohorts, the solutions remain largely the personal triumphs of a resourceful hero. The subsequent development of the police procedural demanded a different kind of protagonist and more systematic attention to the department. Other features of Kyd’s novels, such as his conventional dramatic climaxes, were scarcely compatible with this new genre.

The hybrid nature of Kyd’s Phelan novels has obscured their originality for many historians of mystery and detective fiction. Phelan exemplified many people, in police and other work, who attained vocational competence before World War II only later to find themselves laboring amid specialized professionals. The Phelan type of detective actually did exist but rapidly became obsolete. In the interests of realism the police procedural sent its Phelans to pasture and focused on the exigencies of the precinct. Thus, Phelan can no longer be replicated; he can, however, still be enjoyed.

Biography

Alfred Bennett Harbage, who would adopt the name Thomas Kyd for his detective writings in middle age, was born in Philadelphia on July 18, 1901, the son of John Albert Harbage, a grocer, and Elizabeth (Young) Harbage. Entering the University of Pennsylvania in 1920, he earned successively the degrees of bachelor of arts (1924), master of arts (1926), and doctor of philosophy (1929). He married Eliza Finnesey in 1926; the couple subsequently had four children.

An academic to the core, he began teaching at his alma mater while a graduate student in 1924 and remained there for twenty-three years, meanwhile earning a reputation as an author of scholarly books on English drama. In 1946 he published the first Phelan novel; the second followed the next year, when he also accepted an appointment as an associate professor of English at Columbia University. After his third Phelan novel in 1948, Harbage turned his attention to the mystery thriller for a time.

With his detective novels behind him, he became professor of English literature at Harvard University in 1952, remaining there until his retirement in 1970 and adding to his already impressive academic achievements. He served as general editor of the thirty-eight-volume Pelican Shakespeare series (1956-1967) and wrote several books on William Shakespeare and numerous scholarly articles. He received many academic awards, including honorary doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania in 1954 and Bowdoin College in 1972.

In retirement Harbage returned to the Philadelphia area where he had spent his first forty-six years, residing in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, until his death at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia on May 2, 1976.

Analysis

When Thomas Kyd began writing his Sam Phelan novels in the mid-1940’s, the detective assigned to an urban police force had not yet become a staple of mystery and detective fiction. Although elements of earlier detective genres recur in the Phelan books, they are transmuted into a fresh conception. Like earlier mystery writers of the genteel variety, Kyd demonstrates a fondness for wit and literary allusion, but he does not allot such accomplishments to Phelan; rather, he distributes them among his cohorts and minor characters. To a considerable extent Sam’s character is defined by means of his plainspoken reactions to their knowledge and cleverness. Closer to the practical, tough-minded, tough-talking private investigators of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Phelan emerges as less crude and cynical, more sensitive and kindhearted, than his hard-boiled predecessors.

He is also a public servant, part of a team of investigators whose analysis of criminal evidence has become increasingly specialized. Kyd was offering a detective much closer to reality than either the leisured English sleuth of writers from Arthur Conan Doyle to Dorothy L. Sayers or the private eye who freelanced or had vague connections with an agency. Such a figure posed a considerable challenge for Kyd. A police detective could not plausibly operate in the highly distinctive manner of either of those previous types; nor could the author afford to lose him in a maze of officials and procedures. A different personality was called for: someone who attained distinction not as a brilliant or bold individual but as a leader and coordinator of the efforts of a heterogeneous group. Prescribed routine and scientific techniques became more important, but neither could be allowed to swamp the interest in the protagonist that had sustained the detective novel for several decades. In response to this problem, Kyd created Sam Phelan.

Police officers had long suffered from a reputation as brave and tenacious but stupid enforcers of the law—a reputation presumably justifying the amateur or private detective. Kyd wisely avoided making Phelan a mere butt of humor. Instead, he created a sympathetic investigator with manifest strengths and weaknesses, a man who strikes readers as like them in many ways, though in the last analysis a bit more perceptive, as a good detective of any sort should be. Phelan, a mere high school graduate, must, like many of his generation in various fields of endeavor, deal with and depend on the assistance of the more highly educated. J. Roth Newbold, the dapper district attorney, takes a dim view of Phelan’s intelligence, while the latter despises the snobbishness of this wittier and more sophisticated representative of a class he can well do without. Phelan manages to maintain a generally good working relationship with Newbold’s two assistants, both clever and well educated, although he is inclined to disparage their overingenious theorizing about the crimes they investigate and to wax gleeful when he can disprove them.

Phelan is intelligent enough to acknowledge his reliance on the findings of police photographers, ballistic experts, and other technicians. An essentially practical man, he values the mysterious ways of analysts of physical evidence but has little use for abstract speculations, his impatience with long-windedness even leading him to neglect his usual thoroughness on occasion. In Kyd’s third novel, Blood on the Bosom Devine (1948), for example, Phelan avoids the duty of interrogating an eyewitness to a murder because he knows the witness to be an exasperatingly absentminded professor—until his chief, Cleveland Jones, advises him to carry it out. Phelan trusts the chief, despite the latter’s penchant for quoting Shakespeare and John Milton, because Jones has worked his way up through the local police ranks and demonstrated his command of constabulary nuts and bolts. Naturally, Phelan learns nothing valuable from the professor—his instincts are usually correct—but he realizes that while a good detective pursues positive hunches, he cannot afford to exclude witnesses on the basis of even well-founded hunches.

Sam Phelan sometimes jumps to conclusions that are right but only gratuitously so. In Blood on the Bosom Devine he suspects the right person and accuses him after several days of intensive work, but then, because of the murderer’s sincerely indignant reaction to a wrongly attributed motive, withdraws his accusation, only later realizing the true motive and circling back to get his man. Because Phelan can admit his mistakes, however, neither Chief Jones nor the reader loses faith in him. Phelan seems to rule out some of his suspects very abruptly; his decisions, however, reflect a commonsense approach that keeps him on or close to the right track. Diverting details hold no charm for him.

Phelan uses much of the lingo of the hard-boiled detective. He is likely to tell witnesses to “beat it” when he is through with them and readily calls young females “sweetheart,” but his unpolished manners are a professional mechanism rather than a reflection of the essential Sam, who proves to be old-fashioned and even prudish. He worries over the morals of young boys who sneak into theaters to watch burlesque shows and rules out as a girlfriend an otherwise admirable young woman immodest enough to appear as a “curvaceous cutie” en route to what she hopes is a more dignified theatrical career. Though prejudiced, he is capable of enlargement. He struggles to absorb at least a few of the great books recommended by Chief Jones and finds it difficult to blame criminals when he discovers the circumstances underlying their antisocial behavior. A relatively unschooled man, he nevertheless takes advantage of his opportunities to learn through living and doing.

The settings of the Sam Phelan books reflect Kyd’s background and interests: the academic environment, the ethnic neighborhoods and prestigious suburban enclaves of an area patterned after Philadelphia, and the world of the theater. He studiously avoided the pseudo-gothic trappings that the first Philadelphia mystery writer, Charles Brockden Brown, had attempted to domesticate in America a century and a half earlier. Kyd’s murders occur in the open before witnesses: in a crowded university lecture hall, on the spacious lawn of an elegant estate, on a spotlighted stage. Surprisingly, he manages to engender and maintain mystery in circumstances unfavorable to calculated and anonymous violence.

Blood Is a Beggar

Unlike the literary detective who seems always to be in his or her element, Phelan, the former boxer from a working-class neighborhood, finds himself thrust into the rarefied atmosphere of the university in Kyd’s first novel, Blood Is a Beggar (1946). The novel is set a few years earlier, in a time when only a small and chiefly privileged segment of the population attended college. Kyd knew this world well, but it is significant that he knew it as a Philadelphia grocer’s son and thus was able to imagine the mingled awe and condescension of a man such as Sam Phelan toward well-heeled undergraduates and comfortable professors. Amused and annoyed by the college crowd, Phelan in turn seems incomparably droll to his social betters. When Blood Is a Beggar appeared, the influx of veterans had begun to work profound changes on higher education, but Phelan mirrors an attitude still prevalent among the general population in 1946. Phelan encounters the upper crust in its native lair in Blood of Vintage (1947) and solves the case without winning any prizes for diplomacy.

Blood on the Bosom Devine

It was in the third and last Sam Phelan novel, however, that Kyd used his setting to best advantage. Under his given name, Alfred B. Harbage, he had written extensively about the stage and also about theatergoers, as evidenced by the title of one of his best books, Shakespeare’s Audience (1941). The mystery and solution of Blood on the Bosom Devine depend on the author’s familiarity with theatrical architecture, properties, and equipment, especially lighting. A burlesque queen is murdered onstage as she poses on a pedestal that revolves in and out of a spotlight. Phelan intuitively recognizes that the killer cannot be from the audience; it is only when he learns more of what his creator knows about the angles and possibilities of vision onstage and in the wings that he can reconstruct the murder accurately.

His investigation obliges him to question an obnoxious young fraternity man and the aggravating Professor Surtees, as well as a clergyman who has attended the show to determine for himself the seriousness of the threat it posed to the moral health of his congregation. Will Ferguson, an assistant to District Attorney Newbold, constructs an elaborate Freudian argument to “prove” the Reverend Tumpton guilty of the murder. Phelan’s visit to Tumpton’s Chapel of the Burning Bush enables him to demolish Ferguson’s theory. This interview and one with Professor Surtees are the humorous high points of this best of Kyd’s novels. Later, Newbold’s other assistant, Hugh Espendale, develops his own ingenious scenario—complex, logical, and wrong. Phelan has already used psychology of a more basic sort to solve the murder.

Kyd’s academic background contributes in another way to his fiction. A large proportion of scholarly work is detection, by nature consisting largely of negative and irrelevant evidence that cannot, however, be dismissed until shown to be such. The test of the scholar as well as of the detective is likely to be a willingness to continue patiently, systematically, and imaginatively at times when the fun has gone out of the investigation. Kyd skillfully conveys the inevitable weariness and discouragements of such work as well as the exhilaration of success that justifies the whole endeavor.

By and large Kyd plays fair with his readers, who have an adequate chance to solve the crimes. Blood of Vintage is perhaps overly complicated, but in Blood on the Bosom Devine especially he presents the clues adroitly, one as early as the first sentence in the story—although only the most alert reader would be likely to know what to make of it. Artful plotting in the mode of the classical detective story, rather than fast-moving adventure punctuated by frequent violence, predominates in this novel; still, the tightly knit plot reflects a recognizable world.

The prose of the Sam Phelan novels is inelegant but serviceable and straightforward. The sentences are short; the description is generally curt, though colorful at times. These qualities are visible in the following passage from the first chapter of Kyd’s third novel:

Ferguson reached for the typescript and read a few lines. When he would come to certain words, his owlish expression would dissolve into imbecilic delight. His eyes would widen and leer, his lips seems to drool. The Chief burst into a guffaw.

Kyd’s style reflects his academic roots only when he is presenting the speech of academic characters; elsewhere it runs to the laconic simplicity that Ernest Hemingway bequeathed to the hard-boiled school. He depends much—some might think excessively—on short, snappy dialogue. There is very little show of authorial omniscience. Although Phelan clearly reflects on the evidence he so doggedly accumulates, very little sense of his mental processes is given until the final unraveling, when he shows himself adept at extracting the essential from a mass of testimony and technical data.

Cover His Face

Although Kyd chose settings not remote in time, the world he showed was rapidly vanishing even as the Sam Phelan books appeared. Rather than bring Phelan into the postwar era, Kyd published in 1949 a mystery novel called Cover His Face, in which a young English instructor goes to England in search of letters by Dr. Samuel Johnson but finds instead nerve-wracking danger. In this work and in a few short stories published in the 1950’s, Kyd abandoned detection as such for thrills and suspense. Thus, the career of Sam Phelan was a short one, but he stands as one of the earliest and most neglected protagonists of the detective genre later to be typed as the police procedural. Persistent, dedicated, subject to unwelcome political pressure and the constraining orders of superiors, fallible, thoroughly human, equipped with enough fortitude and common sense to prevail, Sam Phelan remains a believable and engaging character.

Principal Series Characters:

• Sam Phelan , a former boxer, is a police lieutenant in a large Eastern city in the early 1940’s. About thirty years old, he remains a bachelor through three books. He is blunt, patient, diligent, sometimes blundering, but more intelligent and imaginative than he appears.
• Cleveland Jones , the chief of police, is Phelan’s boss, adviser, and chess partner. An educated man with literary taste, Jones nevertheless learned his job from the beat up.
• J. Roth Newbold , the district attorney, is sarcastic and something of a dandy. Responsive to public demands for efficient justice, he presses the police for speedy arrests even in complex and baffling cases.
• Dr. Alexander Surtees , a retired octogenarian professor, irritating and unfathomable to Phelan, must be interviewed in each of his cases. Given to maddening digressions and abrupt naps in the midst of interrogations, Surtees provides much of the novels’ comic relief.

Bibliography

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. A Catalogue of Crime, 1971.

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. “Preface to Blood on the Bosom Devine,” in A Book of Prefaces to Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction 1900-1950, 1976.

Hayne, Barrie. “Thomas Kyd,” in Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, 1985. Edited by John M. Reilly.

Waugh, Hillary. “The Police Procedural,” in The Mystery Story, 1976. Edited by John Ball.