Robert Barr

• Born: September 16, 1850
• Birthplace: Glasgow, Scotland
• Died: October 21, 1912
• Place of death: Woldingham, Surrey, England

Type of Plot: Private investigator

Principal Series: Eugène Valmont, 1904-1906

Contribution

In the character of Eugène Valmont, Robert Barr capitalized on the popularity of detective fiction and gentlemanly sleuths, whose antecedents were Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. His perspective, however, was distinctly ironic: Valmont’s investigations, when not completely trivial, are often failures. Barr satirized the school of literary masterminds through a firm control of the devices of the form. He was a master of burlesque narrative, in which a final reversal of the situation in point turns the suspicious events into innocent practices. Banal solutions put the supposed complications into a nonsinister perspective, offering comic resolutions within the normal complexities and deceptions of “serious” detective fiction. Barr’s consulting detective, who is anything but self-effacing, has been suggested as a model for Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, first envisioned in 1916, and there are appreciable likenesses of character. Valmont’s continuing appearances in anthologies testify to the success of Barr’s inspired and offbeat creation.

Biography

Robert Barr was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on September 16, 1850, the eldest of eight children of Robert Barr, a carpenter, and his wife, Jane Barr. The family moved to Wallacetown, Ontario, in 1854, and thereafter to Windsor. After teaching provisionally at rural posts in Kent County, Barr entered the Toronto Normal School in 1873 (a period satirized in his novel The Measure of the Rule, 1907), earning a third-class teaching certificate. He taught in Wallacetown and Walkerville and became principal of the Windsor Central School.

By this time, Barr was an intermittent contributor of comic pieces to the Bothwell Advance and the Toronto satirical magazine Grip. The Detroit Free Press accepted his mock-heroic account of an 1875 voyage around Lake Erie’s south shore; in 1876, he joined the paper’s staff, working first as a reporter, later as a columnist, and finally as its exchange editor.

In 1881, Barr established the British edition of the newspaper in London; he contributed interviews, obituaries, character sketches, anecdotes, facetious travel notes, and columns. By the 1890’s, journalism had become a lucrative career for him. In 1892, he and humorist Jerome K. Jerome founded The Idler, a glossy, lavishly illustrated monthly magazine that enjoyed immediate success and that featured an impressive list of contributors. Barr coedited The Idler through 1895 and again from 1902 until it ceased publication in 1911. His first collection of stories appeared in 1883, his first novel in 1894. Fluent in profanity, he was a sociable raconteur, a constant smoker, and a vigorous clubman.

Barr built his own home, Hillhead, in Woldingham, Surrey, where he was an invaluable and solicitous friend to his neighbor Stephen Crane, and also associated with other literary figures of the day. His hobbies included cycling, golf, photography, and travel—to Algeria, Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, Italy, the United States, and Canada. In 1900, he was awarded an honorary master of arts by the University of Michigan. Barr died at Woldingham on October 21, 1912, survived by a son, a daughter, and a grandchild.

Analysis

Robert Barr’s principal talent lay in the cleverness and ingenuity of his plots, particularly in his ability to devise ironic twists to otherwise straightforward situations. He had no particular command of naturalistic detail; his locations remain almost completely functional. His narrative language is formally correct and elegantly characterless. None of his characters is realized with any physical or psychological depth; they remain lightly sketched and one-dimensional, excelling only in badinage and facetious dialogue. He wrote with a facility that came from his journalistic background, addressing the voracious popular market for superficial fiction. Until he created Eugène Valmont, his inventiveness and wit existed almost completely at the level of romantic froth.

“The Great Pegram Mystery”

A number of detective and mystery stories and novels preceded Barr’s success with The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont (1906). “The Great Pegram Mystery” (originally published in The Idler of 1892 as “Detective Stories Gone Wrong—The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs”) was a distinct departure from his usual short-story practice. Not unlike the Holmesian prototype, Sherlaw Kombs plays the violin, scorns Scotland Yard, anticipates a visitor before his arrival and skillfully deduces his occupation and mission, uses a magnifying glass at the scene of the apparent crime, makes calculations to the inch, and meticulously unravels the sequence of events ex post facto. Kombs insists on dealing only with facts, and, within the boundaries of circumstantial evidence, his reconstruction is faultless. His aide, Whatson, the narrator, is an exclamatory naïve admirer and straight man, of no assistance whatever.

One would hope that Barr’s friend Doyle greeted this inspired silliness with magnanimity, for Kombs mistakes for suicide a case of robbery and murder that occurred, as a devastating touch, nowhere near the location of the body in a train compartment. The pastiche is of a high order. It is augmented by Kombs’s precise and completely self-assured investigation, and by his wonderfully tongue-in-cheek justification of his conclusions (the “motive”):

Nothing is more calculated to prepare the mind for self-destruction than the prospect of a night ride on the Scotch Express, and the view from the windows of the train as it passes through the northern part of London is particularly conducive to thoughts of annihilation.

This story was included in Ellery Queen’s anthology The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (1944).

From Whose Bourne?

The novella From Whose Bourne? (1893) further anticipated Barr’s attention to detective fiction. In it, a ghost assists in clearing his wife, who is wrongfully suspected of having poisoned him at a dinner party. The French spirit-detective Lecocq, a precursor of Eugène Valmont, possesses all the formality, pride, and obtuseness of Sherlaw Kombs: He seems adept only at collating the obvious facts in their logical order, an exercise that he considers child’s play. Though the story is protracted and unfocused in development—the ostensible impulse behind the two prime suspects is purely romantic—it does demonstrate Barr’s fondness for the unusual solution (here, an inadvertently switched drug) beyond the obligatory complications at the level of the apparently guilty parties.

Revenge!

The mystery stories collected in Revenge! (1896) are considerably more satisfactory. Ranging over a variety of international locales, the majority of the tales conclude with the discomfiture or death of the antagonists by such devices as dynamite, naphtha, billiards, revolvers, an avalanche, and the stock exchange. “An Alpine Divorce,” for example, develops the situation of a couple who hate each other. The wife commits suicide by flinging herself off a cliff in Switzerland, having first framed her husband in public for her prospective murder. In “Which Was the Murderer?” a woman must smother her wounded and possibly dying husband with a pillow to ensure that his assailant does not escape the charge of murder.

These stories are confined by rapid development, minimal attention to physical environment, a more or less genteel level of society, virtually interchangeable characters at best distinguished by their sex or position, and a formal, literate, but featureless style. Nevertheless, they often prove Barr’s considerable powers of invention and show how masterfully he could work within the limits of the popular short-story format.

The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont

The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont was for Barr a triumph of complementary character and style: Valmont’s singular nature is, effectively, often the principal content of his cases. He is the only individual with any real depth in these stories. The collection, in which Barr rose well above his journalistic competence, represents his single sustained foray into the genre of detective fiction.

Though he is consistently opinionated, autocratic, and self-satisfied during his investigations, Eugène Valmont possesses an undeniable charm; his quirks and fixations make him entirely distinctive. His appeal is only augmented by his preening. Sublimely convinced of his own superiority and thoroughness, he prides himself on his urbanity of manner, though he is galled by having been mocked in the French press. His deductions are incisive and eminently plausible, even when radically misdirected. At times, however, he relies on intuition, rather than on proof or evidence. He has monumental vanity, Gallic vivacity, and an unshakable dedication. He is also much interested in the financial rewards accruing from private practice.

It is Valmont’s character that sustains these stories: His sometimes intelligent obtuseness, his blindness to the obvious, and his unceasing identification of criminal activity are delightful. He is prone to discover suspicious circumstances and complications where none exist. He has a “fixed rule never to believe that I am at the bottom of any case until I have come on something suspicious,” and his conclusions often supplant normal human insight or consideration of alternative truths. Valmont can coolly explain or rationalize any discrepancy between his projections and the reality of a sequence of events.

Though Valmont prides himself on his calmness and imperturbability, the nature of the English disturbs him. He is infinitely condescending toward British police methods, against which he rails constantly, bemusedly, and patronizingly. He believes that the concept of innocence until guilt is proved is ridiculous, as he explains what to him are his justifiable violations of due process in the face of English conservative thought. Throughout his questionable triumphs, the inexplicability of the nation’s mentality is a repeated target in crafty asides: “It is little wonder the English possess no drama, for they show scant appreciation of the sensational moments in life; they are not quickly alive to the lights and shadows of events.”

For Valmont, the English personality is epitomized in the stolid Spenser Hale of Scotland Yard, who is often the butt of his barbs. It is Hale who Valmont blames for his own inflation of elementary cases: “Sometimes the utter simplicity of the puzzles which trouble him leads me into an intricate involution entirely unnecessary in the circumstances.” Conversely, even though he harps repeatedly on his dismissal by the French government, managing to glorify himself in the process, Valmont celebrates the people and culture of France at every opportunity:

It is my determination yet to write a book on the comparative characteristics of the two people. I hold a theory that the English people are utterly incomprehensible to the rest of humanity, and this will be duly set out in my forthcoming volume.

Valmont’s diction is almost completely formal and grammatically elegant, though he lapses occasionally into supposedly French inversions and amusing turns of English idiom. While Valmont is deflecting anarchist activities in Paris, he is complimented on his verbal facility:

Monsieur Valmont, you have stated the case with that clear comprehensiveness pertaining to a nation which understands the meaning of words, and the correct adjustment of them; that felicity of language which has given France the first place in the literature of nations.

“The Mystery of the Five Hundred Diamonds”

In “The Mystery of the Five Hundred Diamonds,” the first sequence of connected stories in The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont, Valmont must guarantee the safe transport out of France to the purchaser of an ill-starred necklace consigned to public auction. He assumes that fraud is inevitable and that the successful bidder is a hitherto unknown prince of criminals, and thus he gives chase. The detailed and protracted pursuit on foot, by coach, and by boat, complicated by such red herrings as miscues, disguises, transfer of the goods, and an American detective, is excitingly and effectively rendered. Here the point is the elaboration of Valmont’s method and resources rather than his initial error of identification and creation of a task that did not require his talent for complication.

“The Absent-Minded Coterie”

The essence of Valmont is evident in “The Absent-Minded Coterie,” a sequence of four chapters that has enjoyed an enduring anthology life. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine of March, 1950, celebrated the adventure in “A Poll of Twelve on the Best Dozen Detective Stories,” along with works of such writers as G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Aldous Huxley. In the story, Scotland Yard’s presumption of an illegal coining establishment and recruitment of Valmont leads to an apparent confidence scheme run by a curiosity-shop owner who, in an amusing irrelevancy, also writes Christian Science pamphlets under a pseudonym. Absentminded buyers of goods are thought to lose track of their debts over the course of the collection of weekly installments. Valmont bristles with suspicion, but he has no hard evidence of wrongdoing. With an uncharacteristic sneering heavy-handedness, he accuses one of the merchant’s canvassers of merely playing the innocent. Throughout, the modest operative metaphor of a London fog is appropriate to the supposed victims of the alleged scheme and even more to Valmont himself, who is undeniably clever but wrong, misled by his earnest determination to uncover deceit. He is left unrepentant but nonplussed by the canvasser’s explanation of his and his employer’s quite legitimate and well-intentioned enterprise. Here, as elsewhere, Barr does not dwell on Valmont’s reaction to the facts; the story ends with the revelation, not with discomfiture, self-recrimination, or rationalization.

Valmont’s “triumphs,” whether real, petty, or nonexistent, are more a vindication of his personality than practical and satisfactory demonstrations of his self-proclaimed genius as a detective. With this satiric version of the master sleuth, Barr made a distinctive contribution to the growing pantheon of literary investigators, before wit and insight were joined to physical derring-do in the later, more forceful forms of the genre.

Principal Series Character:

• Eugène Valmont is a private investigator in London, formerly chief detective to the French government, of indeterminate age, perhaps in his mid-forties, and unmarried. He is arrogant, self-celebrating, and procedurally impeccable; his admirably incisive deductions frequently mistake appearance for fact in Barr’s knowing parody of the genre.

Bibliography

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. A Catalogue of Crime. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Massive, nearly one-thousand-page critical bibliography of mystery, detective, and spy stories. Provides context for understanding Barr. Includes an index.

Kestner, Joseph A. The Edwardian Detective, 1901-1915. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Discusses Barr’s literary production within the context of the detective fiction being written in England in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century.

Klinck, Carl F., ed. Literary History of Canada. Vol 1. 2d ed. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Detailed four-volume history of Canadian literature and literary culture is a good source for understanding Barr’s background. Bibliographies and indexes.

MacGillivray, S. R. “Robert Barr.” In The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, edited by Eugene Benson and William Toye. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Examines Barr’s place, and the place of detective fiction as such, within the body of Canadian literature.

Parr, John. “The Measure of Robert Barr.” Journal of Canadian Fiction 3, no. 2 (1974): 21-31. Evaluates Barr as a Canadian author and a contributor to a properly Canadian literary culture.