Literary Aspects of Mystery Fiction

Introduction

Readers of fiction who enter modern bookstores are confronted with a series of choices. Not only are books separated and shelved according to basic categories such as fiction and nonfiction, but fictional works may be subdivided into various genres, such as “classic” fiction, literary fiction, general fiction, mysteries, science fiction, Westerns, and romance fiction. Readers may be even further confounded, however, when works that seem to fit squarely into one genre are shelved in another. For example, the works of are obviously mysteries; with the introduction of Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1939), Chandler created one of the most famous and archetypal private eyes of the genre. However, in some stores, readers may find some of his novels housed within the general fiction section rather than within the mystery section.

Bookstores organize titles by category to assist readers in finding what they want to read. Despite the apparent usefulness of such labeling, however, there is a negative side effect evident in the need for not only booksellers but also the entire literary world to separate titles among different genres. Inevitably, it seems, genre fiction is regarded as less challenging, more poorly written, and generally inferior in quality to so-called literary fiction. Regardless of the merit of drawing such aesthetic distinctions among genres, certain authors blur the lines. Distinctions between mystery and literary fiction become even hazier when one considers not only the mystery authors who write at a highly artistic level, such as Chandler and , but also the many authors who work simultaneously within the genre and in literary fiction, such as and and the authors of literary fiction who have turned to mystery writing, such as .

Origins of the Genre

Paradoxically, the battle between genre conventions and aesthetic respectability dates to the origins of the novel in English. During the form’s growth in the eighteenth century, the intellectual elite felt that poetry was for serious literature and the novel for satire and entertainment only. By the middle of the nineteenth century, prejudice against the novel had largely vanished, but as genre publishing flourished, works were still at times judged prematurely by their categories and not by their substance.

, the inventor of the modern detective story, did not concern himself with genre bias. An editor, well-known poet, reviewer, critic, and master of the gothic short story, he introduced detective Auguste Dupin and his friend, the unnamed narrator of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). He was little appreciated during his lifetime, but during the decades following his death, his reputation rose to prominence, particularly in Europe. The mystery form gained further development in Bleak House (1852-1853) by English writer . One of its subplots deals with a murder and a police inspector’s investigation. Dickens’s friend soon wrote what many consider to be the first full mystery novel in The Woman in White (1859), about an art teacher’s quest to solve the mystery of a strange woman he encounters on the road. Collins would also add to the form with The Moonstone (1868) about the theft of a large diamond. Like Dickens and Poe, Collins led an active literary life as both an editor and a writer of works that were not mysteries. During his lifetime, he was not closely associated with the mystery genre. As originators of the form, Poe and Collins cannot be said to be following a formula; however, the same cannot be said of those who came later.

Formula and Pulp

In 1887, introduced, in A Study in Scarlet, the most famous fictional detective ever created, Sherlock Holmes. Influenced by Poe and Collins, Doyle would go on to publish three more novels and more than fifty short stories about Holmes and his friend and narrator Dr. Watson, and a definite formula emerged. The prototype developed by Doyle would provide the basis for the English, or cozy, mystery stories. Later writers in both Great Britain and the United States, such as , , , and would follow in Doyle’s footsteps and further formalize the pattern. A seemingly insolvable crime—such as the notorious “ locked-room mystery”—is perpetrated; the detective, often an amateur sleuth, is engaged; many victims, witnesses, detectives, and murderers are members of the aristocracy; and the crime is often set in an isolated community, such as a pastoral hereditary estate.

Many critics argue that once writing follows formulaic patterns, that the repetition of plots, settings, characters, and overall methods interferes with creativity, originality, and the art of a given story. Doyle, as the refiner of the form, and perhaps due to the idiosyncratic characterization he provided Holmes, has been in some ways exempt from such criticism. However, stories written following Doyle’s method more than fifty or sixty years after Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes stories have difficulty making claims for innovation or originality. Furthermore, due to the repetition and lack of originality, the use of genre forms in itself seems to work in some ways against literary style. Even when the American hard-boiled school arose in reaction to the cozy mystery formula during the 1920s and 1930s from such innovators as , the new style very quickly became formulaic.

The mystery genre has ever been wedded to a kind of media that bespeaks less-than-ambitious intentions. Mysteries as well as gothic stories, romances, Westerns, and all manner of adventure stories were published in great number in English penny dreadful tabloid magazines, then in cheaply produced dime novels, and eventually in pulp magazines, which were so named for the cheap paper used in them, that dominated the genre literary market from the late nineteenth century through the 1950s. Two of the most important pulp magazines, Great Britain’s The Strand Magazine (1891-1950) and the American Black Mask (1920-1951), published many of the greatest writers of the genre. Stories by Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie appeared in The Strand, and stories by Hammett, Chandler, and appeared in Black Mask. The literary establishment typically sneered at the pulps, as it did the paperbacks that succeeded them during the Depression and World War II and eventually become a mainstay of publishing. Ironically, in 1983, American writer Barry Gifford would found the Black Lizard Press, which reissued vintage crime novels with a reputation for literary excellence in a line of trendy, artistically rendered trade-sized paperbacks. This firm was later acquired by Random House and merged with Vintage Crime, and the resulting Black Lizard/Vintage Crime started publishing high-quality paperback editions of writers such as Hammett and Chandler that automatically acquired an air of literary credibility.

Evaluating Literary Worth

Judging the merits and value of works of mystery fiction, as with any kind of art, is complicated. Beauty, as the saying goes, is in the eye of the beholder; taste seems to be almost entirely subjective. Nevertheless, for many mystery writers who have entered the so-called canon of literature, a multitude of critics, writers, and readers have been able to reach an accord on their worth, so there must be some measure of objective standards. In fact, the North American branch of the International Association of Crime Writers awards the Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in the Field of Crime Writing.

Furthermore, mystery fiction is being read more seriously now than previously, as many scholars in the academy have embraced the cultural studies approach, which, as a critical movement, is less focused on discerning aesthetic value. This approach considers popular culture to be an essential part of a society and thus worthy of scholarship; its influence in the academy has led writers such as French critic to write essays on such popular culture interests as diverse as professional wrestling. The Journal of Popular Culture has been in operation since 1968, and a number of treatises and books have been written on the value, meaning, methods, and purpose of various kinds of popular culture.

A useful example of such a scholarly work is Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s 1964 study, The Popular Arts, which argues that works of art can be divided into three categories. First is high art, which challenges audiences, or readers, breaks new ground, and refuses to rely on convention. The opposite extreme is mass art, which follows formulas and conventions to such an extent that it exists only for simple entertainment and reaffirms the audience’s beliefs and viewpoints rather than challenging them. The authors distinguish mass art, however, from what they call popular art. The third category, popular art, is created within the parameters of popular formulas and conventions, as is mass art, yet manages to rise above the form, challenging its audience intellectually, or philosophically, or in other ways. Hall and Whannel would consider superb books in the mystery genre, such as Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1954), to be popular art, and more clichéd works, such as The Dragon Murder Case (1933) by S. S. Van Dine to be mass art.

Judging a fictional work’s value is a problematical exercise, yet most critics can agree on certain criteria. First, is a story innovative? Poe’s trilogy of Dupin stories is important, in part, because no one had ever written such stories before. Secondly, are the story’s plot and setting distinctive, original, new? Or is it the same story that has been read hundreds of times before? is an example of a writer who reinvigorated the private eye genre with March Violets (1989), a novel about a German detective set in Berlin shortly before World War II. Are the story’s characters interesting, appealing, engaging, and realistic? Do they seem fresh, and are they fully rounded and developed characters, or are they simply stereotypical and flat? Realism, or verisimilitude, often seems to play a part as well: Are details realistic and plausible? Has the author done sufficient research? Does the work stretch the boundaries of probability?

Finally, and most difficult to articulate—is the story well crafted? Does the author simply write well? Does the author have a distinctive style or a poetic diction or a wry sense of humor that leaps off the page? Although this last criterion of craft is the hardest to define, it is probably the most essential element in defining the literary value of a text.

Dashiell Hammett

In his 1944 essay on crime writing and the evolution of the hard-boiled school titled “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler wrote, “Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.” This vitality is made clear through the work of Chandler and two other of the most important writers from the era between the world wars that, on the one hand, is referred to as the Golden Age in the English mystery tradition, and, on the other, witnessed the birth of the hard-boiled tradition.

Among the mystery writers working during the 1920s, Dashiell Hammett was uniquely qualified to write about detectives because he had worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. More than any other writer, he developed the hard-boiled detective subgenre with the short stories he began publishing about an unnamed investigator whom he simply called the Continental Op in Black Mask. Although some of Hammett’s plots were possibly as convoluted as those of traditional cozy mysteries, he nevertheless brought a verisimilitude to his stories in the criminals who peopled them, their use of street slang, their motivations and methods, and his unaffected and understated depictions of violence. Hammett’s stories were more often about criminals than about aristocrats, and murders were typically committed for prosaic and realistic reasons. Hammett truly hit his stride with The Maltese Falcon in 1930, which introduced the world to private eye Sam Spade. Whereas the Continental Op was always bound by duty, Spade was a more ambiguous, morally obscure character, much like Ned Beaumont, the gangster protagonist of Hammett’s The Glass Key (1931).

The Maltese Falcon differed from Hammett’s Continental Op novels (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, both serialized initially but published in book form in 1929) in that Sam Spade was a lone operator—after his partner was murdered—and the story is told in the third person, rather than in the first-person point of view of the Op stories. In all Hammett’s books, however, the detectives remain ciphers. Readers know nothing of the Continental Op’s life outside his work; they do even know his name. Similarly, the central mystery of The Maltese Falcon is not about the missing statuette that Spade is hired to find or locating the murderer of his partner; it is Spade himself.

Hammett’s most important innovation is his prose style. It is clean, stripped, and sparse but almost poetic at times due to its cadence and Hammett’s ear for natural-sounding dialogue. Furthermore, his laconic narratives often convey a wry sense of humor, as his characters display a certain penchant for wisecracking that became a staple of the subgenre. In this regard, Hammett’s work resembles that of , but as they were contemporaries, it seems unlikely that either writer had much influence on the other. Interestingly, Hemingway’s memoir about a safari, The Green Hills of Africa (1935), describes how Hemingway’s wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, read Hammett’s The Dain Curse aloud to him. Hammett was not a particularly prolific writer in the detective genre; he published only five novels and fewer than forty short stories during his lifetime. Nevertheless, his influence on the genre is immeasurable.

Dorothy L. Sayers

In contrast to Dashiell Hammett, the British writer Dorothy L. Sayers could not be said to be an innovator within the form. Rather, she makes full and conscious use of the conventions of the English or cozy mystery novel, and her works were influenced by the English writer C. S. Lewis. Her primary detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, whom she introduced in Whose Body? in 1923, is an English aristocrat, not a professional detective. Many of the crimes he investigates take place in isolated settings, such as estates, villages, and colleges. His cases typically boil down to gatherings of all the suspects and denouements in which the suspects are eliminated, one by one, until only the murderers remain.

In Wimsey himself, however, and in his love interest Harriet Vane, Sayers created characters that are more fully rounded than the stock characters of the mystery genre. Wimsey is by turns arrogant and vulnerable; he suffers moments of doubt and worry quite in contrast to the supreme confidence exhibited by detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and ’s Nero Wolfe. A combat veteran of World War I, Wimsey suffers through recurring bouts of shell shock.

Sayers’s craft as a writer is also exemplary. In addition to her fine eye for detail and exact and poetic descriptive writing, her third-person narratives are often suffused with understated and wry humor, reminiscent of the works of and Sayers’s contemporary and other writers of English novels of manners. Indeed, Sayers stated openly upon more than one occasion that her goal was less to write complicated mysteries and more to comment upon the English class system and society, as writers such as Austen had done. In addition to writing detective novels and short stories, she was a respected playwright and scholar, and she wrote many admired pieces on theology.

Raymond Chandler

Like Dorothy L. Sayers, Raymond Chandler received an excellent English education. Although born in Chicago, he attended Dulwich College, a boarding school for boys in a London suburb. A latecomer to writing, he published his first detective story in 1933, when he was forty-five. Like Hammett, Chandler was not a prolific novelist; he published only twenty-five stories, many of which he “cannibalized,” as he put it, for use in his seven novels. He also had some success in Hollywood, where he worked on screenplays of such famous films as Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951).

Although Chandler’s genius was evident early on, it was only with the publication of his novel The Big Sleep in 1939 that Chandler showed his true gifts. In Philip Marlowe, the narrator of all his novels, Chandler created a detective who is tough enough to stand up to hired killers and gangster leaders but sentimental enough to pursue a dangerous and difficult case because of his whimsical affection for his elderly client. The Big Sleep opens with Marlowe standing in the foyer of a mansion examining a picture of a knight trying to rescue a young damsel. Throughout Marlowe’s seven novels, it becomes clear that Marlowe is a down-at-the-heels Sir Lancelot in the modern world, a questing knight working against the forces of chaos and corruption. Marlowe’s basic decency—covered with a cynical shell and ready wisecracks—has doubtless had more influence on the private eyes that followed him than the moral evasiveness of Hammett’s Sam Spade. Although his past is almost as mysterious as that of Hammett’s characters, Marlowe allows himself at times to become invested in his clients’ and friends’ lives. In The Long Goodbye (1954), for example, he allows himself to be thrown in jail and harassed for his friend Terry Lennox. In The Big Sleep, he continues on his case even though he is told by one and all that he has been dismissed from it.

Chandler’s writing style has an immediacy, directness, and fluency that owes much to Hammett, and doubtless also to Hemingway, but his own style is more lyric. Moreover, Marlowe’s personality—his cynicism, his romanticism, and his biting sense of humor—permeates the narratives in ways that do not occur in Hammett’s more restrained writing. Chandler’s gift for metaphor and poetic similes has become a legend in itself; tied with his hard-boiled poignancy and humor, it makes for an ageless style. Witness, for example, these lines from The Little Sister (1949):

I put the duster away folded with the dust in it, leaned back and just sat, not smoking, not even thinking. I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t even want a drink. I was the page from yesterday’s calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket.

The Next Generation

Through the mid-twentieth century, all the various kinds of crime novels—from the hard-boiled private eye novel to the cozy mystery to crime fiction centered around criminals, and they continued to flourish in the decades following World War II. From that era, two names of particular importance appear: Ross Macdonald and .

A native Californian, Ross Macdonald began writing literary fiction while in graduate study at the University of Michigan. After service during World War II interrupted his studies, he wrote and published his first private eye novel, The Moving Target, in 1949. He subsequently completed his doctorate in literature. Macdonald has admitted his debt to Raymond Chandler, and both writers are, indeed, noted for their lyrical descriptions and laconic first-person narratives. Nevertheless, for all their similarities as writers Macdonald’s detective Lew Archer becomes a unique and different private eye. Like Chandler’s Marlowe, Archer—who is named after Sam Spade’s murdered partner in The Maltese Falcon—gets involved with his clients and even his quarries. However, the divorced and lonely Archer has a level of humanity and ability to identify with both victims and suspects that makes him far more vulnerable than either Marlowe or Spade. Archer eschews violence when possible and, more than anything else, is interested in the human truths at the core of mysteries.

Although Patricia Highsmith’s focus was more on crime than mystery fiction, she often involved her criminals in complicated mysteries. A graduate of Manhattan’s Barnard College with experience in scripting comic books, Highsmith was fascinated by works such as Strangers on a Train (1950) and her Tom Ripley series with the pervasiveness of evil, the banality of everyday life and marriage, and sexual ambiguity. Many of her novels, particularly her five Ripley books, are centered around antiheroes who seek to thwart the law and justice rather than uphold them. At the same time, Highsmith’s works are loved not only because of how she subverts the crime and mystery genres but also because of her complex and dense literary style; Highsmith remained a true original throughout her career. In 2022, her thriller Deep Water (1957) was adapted into a film by the same name directed by Adrian Lyne.

Crossovers

Any discussion of mystery fiction acclaimed for literary merit must also consider authors made famous for literary fiction who also have written mysteries. Often, writers who succeed in other genres find that crossing over into mystery fiction, or another subgenre, is not as easy as it looks, and their genre offerings are less successful than their literary works. There are, however, some notable successes, such as Nobel Prize winner . As a number of critics have noted, Faulkner’s works were often influenced in various subtle ways by detective fiction, and Faulkner himself admired writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Rex Stout. Moreover, during his years in Hollywood, Faulkner helped adapt Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946) to the screen for director Howard Hawks.

Faulkner’s successful ventures into the mystery genre included the novel that put him on the map, Sanctuary (1931), and Intruder in the Dust (1948). Sanctuary is a crime novel, about kidnapping, bootlegging, murder, and an investigating attorney. At the same time, however, it bears the Faulkner stamp of dense and poetic literary style throughout. Similarly, while Intruder in the Dust is ostensibly about a young man proving that an older black man has not committed murder, it is much more a Faulknerian discussion of race and prejudice. Faulkner’s book of detective stories, Knight’s Gambit (1949), featuring his Harvard-educated but nevertheless down-home county detective Gavin Stevens, largely failed to live up to the standards of his more famous works, such as The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930).

Perhaps the greatest straddler of the divide between literary fiction and genre fiction is English writer Graham Greene. He was a journalist who soon became a professional novelist and travel writer. In the latter capacity he occasionally also worked for British Intelligence. Greene saw the novels that he wrote as falling into two categories. The first, serious literary stories dealing with such themes as adultery, love, faith, and Roman Catholicism include such works as The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951). His second category, what he called “entertainments,” encompassed suspense and mystery stories, such as This Gun for Hire (1936) and The Ministry of Fear (1943). Some of Greene’s late novels blur the distinction between “entertainments” and literary fiction so thoroughly that they must be acknowledged for what they are: suspense novels that are so excellent that they should be considered literary achievements. Among these can be counted The Quiet American (1955), The Human Factor (1978), and The Comedians (1966).

Other writers known primarily for their literary works who have written successfully in mystery fiction include the incredibly prolific Joyce Carol Oates, winner of the National Book Award and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer. She has published a series of well-received mysteries under the pseudonyms of Rosamund Smith and Lauren Kelly. Southern novelist T. R. Pearson, who first gained prestige for his whimsical A Short History of a Small Place (1985), about a small town in Appalachian Virginia, has written a number of crime novels that are usually shelved with literary fiction, such as Cry Me a River (1993), Blue Ridge (2000), and Polar (2002). Other Pearson mystery novels are often classified as Westerns or historical fiction, such as Brigade (2018), Confederate States (2020), and Devil Up (2021). Genre-busting literary novelist Jonathan Lethem won the Macallan Gold Dagger award for crime fiction with his novel Motherless Brooklyn (1999), about a bounty hunter with Tourette’s syndrome seeking to solve his boss’s murder. Several other novelists at the time were producing works that defied typical genre categories, such as Susanna Clarke, whose works include The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (2006), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), and Piranesi (2020).

Later Writers

The trend in marketing some genre works in the larger and more expensive trade paperback editions to give them cross-genre appeal has continued, although many novels marketed in such ways are not necessarily worthy of notice. However, one such writer whose career has received wide attention is . A far cry from the stoic Philip Marlowe and taciturn Lew Archer, Crumley’s Milo Milodragovitch of The Wrong Case (1975) and C. W. Sughrue of The Last Good Kiss (1978) make their way through cocaine and alcohol addictions, willing women, and corrupt corporations. Although Crumley’s later novels, such as The Right Madness (2005), have become almost parodies of his earlier books in their slippery plots and extreme violence, the influence of Chandler in characterization and style is evident throughout Crumley’s work.

Women writers continue to be very strongly represented in mystery fiction; furthermore, thanks in part to the hard-boiled novels of Sara Paretsky, whose tough and capable woman private eye V. I. Warshawski first appeared in Indemnity Only (1982), women writers are as prevalent on the hard-boiled side of the aisle as on the cozy side. Paretsky’s work distinguishes itself from that of other writers in how she has created a community of persons. Warshawski is not a cipher like Hammett’s Continental Op but an important and contributing member of her community.

James Ellroy published his first mystery in 1981, yet it was with his Los Angeles Quartet, comprising The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992), that his harsh, violent, unsentimental, and complicated plots and a savagely clipped and poetic style merged to make his writing exceptional and original. White Jazz, particularly, is a tour de force written in a terse, fragmented style. One of the most successful writers of the late twentieth century was James Lee Burke. A literary novelist who turned to hard-boiled crime fiction in the 1987 novel The Neon Rain, Burke merges the past-haunted setting and lyrical language of southern literature in the tradition of Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe with the private eye novel. His further works include The Tin Roof Blowdown (2007), The New Iberia Blues (2019), and Clete (2024). In 1990, Philip Kerr burst upon the scene with March Violets, the first novel in his Berlin Noir series, which also includes The Pale Criminal (1990) and A German Requiem (1991). Kerr’s protagonist, Bernie Gunther, is a German private eye with a lot in common with Philip Marlowe, who tries to retain his soul even as the newly empowered Gestapo seek to coopt it. Kerr continued the Bernie Gunther series in the early twenty-first century with The One from the Other (2006), Greeks Bearing Gifts (2018), and Metropolis (2019).

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