Roots of Mystery and Detective Fiction

Introduction

Any consideration of the history of mystery and detective fiction must start by separating the traditional meaning of the word “mystery” from the genre that bears the name. Even the earliest-known writings of humankind contain elements of mystery. Mystery, as the is word now commonly understood, is the unknown, the unanswered. This is a very different meaning from that used in mystery novels, in which mystery goes from being only one of the elements in a story to being the central purpose of a story. Gothic romance novels, which predate the modern mystery, utilized mysterious elements in their plots, often using the supernatural in combination with dark, long-hidden family secrets that were revealed to readers slowly throughout their pages.

The American author Edgar Allan Poe extracted the mystery element from gothic romance novels and made it the core of three short stories, beginning with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841. With that short story. Poe established a pattern that is still used today. At the center of the story is the crime: two mutilated women in a locked room on an upper floor of a Parisian apartment building. One of the women has been nearly beheaded, the other is stuffed halfway up the chimney. After shocking readers with the brutality of the crime that has already been committed, Poe introduced his detective, C. Auguste Dupin. An amateur detective, Dupin relates his theories to the story’s unnamed narrator, who marvels at Dupin’s brilliance. In this story, then, can be seen the prototypes for future pairings of detectives and companions, of which the most famous include Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Captain Arthur Hastings, and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

Poe’s story also gave the genre its first locked-room mystery. With no evident way in which a murderer could have entered or left the locked room in which the dead women are found, a profound puzzle takes center stage in Poe’s story, and the story is the mystery. The telling of the story, the introduction of the detective, the interviewing of witnesses, the apparent contradictions and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and finally the solving of the case through what Poe termed ratiocination, the triumph of reason.

While Poe influenced virtually all the mystery story writers who would follow him, he had literary influences of his own. For example, he was familiar with François-Eugène Vidocq, the real-life French detective whose four-volume memoirs, a blend of fact and fiction, was published in 1828. Vidocq was a life-long criminal who became a police detective and is credited with starting the first detective agency. Poe mentions Vidocq by name in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Vidocq also served as the model forÉmile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq who first appeared in 1869. Gaboriau was an admitted follower of Poe’s style, and they both were influenced by the legend of Vidocq who, interestingly enough, was also the model for Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean in Les Misérables (1862).

Poe followed “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” with two more short stories featuring Dupin. He based “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842) on the true story of the murder of Mary Rogers in New York City. “The Purloined Letter” (1844) is a story in which the property that is stolen remains hidden in plain sight. Poe’s enduring contribution to the mystery genre, these three short stories provided the framework that later writers in Great Britain, France, America, and the rest of the world would adopt and occasionally improve upon.

Nineteenth Century British and French Mystery Novels

After Poe’s three stories, the genre lay dormant for a decade or two. Eventually, three writers in Europe, one in France and two in England, began to fulfill the promise of Poe’s legacy. Émile Gaboriau’s L’Affaire Lerouge (1866) was the first work in the tradition of Poe to be published in Europe. Monsieur Lecoq became the main character in Gaboriau’s later novels, Le Crime d’Orcival (1867), Le Dossier no. 113 (1867), and Monsieur Lecoq (1868). Gaboriau was the first author to write book-length crime novels, and he also is credited with creating the roman policier, the crime novel form featuring police procedures.

Even before Gaboriau, however, Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House (1852-1853), a novel that featured Inspector Bucket as one of the main characters. In this lengthy novel, Bucket attempts to untangle a complicated case of questionable maternity and comes to the aid of the heroine Esther Summerson. Detective Bucket marked one of the first appearances of a detective in British fiction. However, while Bleak House may have included a detective among its large cast of characters, Dickens’s earlier novels Barnaby Rudge (1841) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) also contained substantial mystery elements. However, Dickens’s greatest contribution to the mystery novel is doubtless his fifteenth and last book, the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Drood was half-written when Dickens suffered a stroke; he died the next day. Because no ending to the novel was ever written or even discussed by Dickens, various authors over the subsequent generations have supplied their own endings.

One of Dickens’s best friends, and a sometime collaborator, was Wilkie Collins. Collins was the son of an English painter, and his influence on Dickens is well evidenced. Collins published his novels serially through Dickens’s periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round. His early novels were primarily social novels that examined how the aristocracy lived. His later novels were essentially social protest novels, works written to draw attention to social ills in Great Britain. However, between those two phases of his writing, Collins wrote what are considered his two best books as well as two of the earliest mystery novels.

The first of Collins’s mystery novels, The Woman in White (1860) concerns a devious plot to disinherit a beautiful young heiress. The primary villain in the story is Count Fosco, one of the best-drawn characters in English literature. A man of great civility and charm on the outside, Fosco manipulates everyone to suit his own needs. There is no designated detective figure in Collins’s novel, but the young heiress, along with the young man who loves her and her devoted half sister, endeavor to solve the intricate case, which includes elements of mistaken identity, false allegations, and organized crime. Collins’s second mystery novel, The Moonstone (1868), involves opium use, a stolen gem, sleepwalking. Like The Woman in White, it is written in a style of limited perspective, with each character revealing only the facts he or she has personally witnessed.

Two Early American Women Mystery Writers

The first detective novel in the United States was written by a woman, Metta Victoria (Fuller) Victor, who lived from 1831 until 1885. Married to Orville Victor, a publisher of dime novels, she wrote under the pseudonym Seeley Regester. Her best-known work is The Dead Letter (1866). Victor wrote many popular novels, and her works encompassed hundreds of titles outside the mystery genre.

A contemporary of Victor was the American writer Anna Katharine Green, who was born in 1846. Green wrote thirty-five novels and four collections of short stories. She was thirty-two years old and a college graduate when she wrote her first novel, The Leavenworth Case (1878). That novel was very successful, and Green was admired for her craft. Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Mary Roberts Rinehart all cited Green as a major influence on their own writing.

Green set most of her novels in the state of New York. Her Victorian-era stories do not stand up well against modern novels, as her writing seems stilted and cumbersome. Nevertheless, Green is sometimes dubbed “The Mother of Detective Fiction.” Her primary detective is an older, rounder man named Ebenezer Gryce. Gryce seldom makes eye contact with people he is questioning; he is more likely to look at their feet if he looks at them at all. Writing between 1878 and 1923, Green created two women detectives, one a spinster and the other a young woman. The spinster, Amelia Butterworth, who made her debut in That Affair Next Door (1897), was a forerunner of Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple. Green’s younger woman, Violet Strange, made her debut in a collection of nine short stories titled The Golden Slipper (1915).

Green also created a fourth detective, Caleb Sweetwater. He first appeared in A Strange Disappearance (1880), but he is much more prominent in Agatha Webb (1899). Sweetwater is a talented violinist who gives up his career to become a detective. Green often has her detectives working in combination, forging relationships. For example, Amelia Butterworth is the lead detective in That Affair Next Door, but Ebenezer Gryce is called in on the case for consultation. Sweetwater often assists Gryce on cases, acting as an operative for the older detective.

Sherlock Holmes

A brilliant man of many passions, Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Scotland. He entered the medical school at Edinburgh University in 1876 and graduated with a doctor of medicine degree in 1885. Afterward, he wrote anonymously for publications in his spare time and served for a time as a ship’s doctor on long sea voyages. After qualifying as a medical doctor, he married and eventually moved his young family to London in 1891. There he took up the specialty of ophthalmology. If his medical practice had been more demanding, perhaps he would not have continued to pursue writing. As it was, he wrote his first novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887), for Beeton’s Christmas Annual. In this way, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson were first introduced to the reading world. The series persisted through 1927, reaching its zenith with the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1902.

Doyle was ambivalent about his most famous fictional creation. He thought that his true calling was to be a writer of historical novels and thought that the time he spent writing about his eccentric detective detracted time he should spend writing more serious literature. Nevertheless, he ultimately produced fifty-six short stories and four novels about the genius detective and his amiable chronicler, and few modern readers pay attention to his historical novels. Doyle followed his second Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four (1890), with his first short story about Holmes, “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891). Despite the great popularity of Holmes, Doyle seemingly wrote an end to his detective in “The Final Problem” (1893). In that story, Holmes becomes locked in a struggle with archenemy Professor Moriarty, and together they plunge to their apparent deaths over a waterfall. However, pressure from his readers later forced Doyle to bring Holmes back.

Doyle modeled Holmes on one of his medical school professors, Dr. Joseph Bell, whose powers of observation and deduction had amazed his students. What is known of Sherlock Holmes comes from a number of sources including the stories themselves, the illustrations drawn by Sidney Paget, based on his younger brother Walter, who was also an illustrator. It is known that Holmes is interested in opera, the violin, and forensics. He shares his flat at 221B Baker Street in London with Watson, and Mrs. Hudson is their housekeeper. Holmes is not without his faults. For example, he uses cocaine in a 7-percent solution, and he generally has a low opinion of women. Inside the confines of his residence dressed in his robe, smoking his pipe, reading a treatise on the mating rituals of bees, Holmes occupies his own universe and lives by his own rules. In this well-known setting, his short stories, first published by The Strand Magazine, take the reader through the four collections: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), and finally The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927).

Mystery at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

The French writer Gaston Leroux is best known today as the author of The Phantom of the Opera (1910), but he, too, was greatly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe. After years as a journalist, he turned to fiction after 1900 and his best-known mystery story is The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) which features one of his two series detectives, Joseph Josephson, also known as Rouletabille because of his bullet-shaped head. Rouletabille was a young journalist and in The Mystery of the Yellow Room encounters a corpse in a locked room. Rouletabille’s friend, Sinclair, serves as the narrator of the story. Leroux’s stories often featured fast-paced, complicated plots with supernatural elements thrown into the mix. His detective with an odd-shaped head inspired several film treatments during the 1930’s and 1940’s in his native France.

Curiously, the American writer Jacques Futrelle also wrote short stories about an amateur detective with a deformed head. His main character, S. F. X. Van Deusen, was popularly known as the Thinking Machine. His abnormally large head supposedly contained a large brain that allowed him to ascertain the answers to the world’s most perplexing problems. His most famous case is “The Problem of Cell Thirteen” (1907). In this case, the Thinking Machine is locked inside a cell with nothing but the clothes on his back. Nevertheless, he miraculously escapes. Futrelle’s writing career and life ended tragically when he went down with the Titanic in 1912.

The English writer R. Austin Freeman created the intellectual detective Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke. No doubt owing to Freeman’s own medical education, Thorndyke is a convincing amateur sleuth who use his vast scientific knowledge to solve crimes in more than forty years’ worth of mysteries, from Freeman’s first novel, The Red Thumb Mark (1907), to two of his better books, As a Thief in the Night (1928) and Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight (1930). Freeman is credited with inventing the inverted mystery, in which readers are introduced to the criminals in the opening pages.

In what has come to be described by critics as a watershed title in the history of mysteries, E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913) turned the tables on the genre. From Poe’s time until then, unerring reason had been at the center of every mystery solution in fiction. Investigators such as C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Thorndyke, and others were all figures with keen intellects and sharp powers of observation who reeled in wrongdoers with the use of their great mental powers. Enter Bentley’s Philip Trent, a young journalist and detective. Trent analyzes evidence, interviews suspects, and through great feats of mental ability arrives exactly at the wrong conclusion. The case is eventually solved, but through no fault of Trent’s. True to his book’s title, Trent swears that this will be his last case. However, that book’s popular success naturally led to sequels: Trent’s Own Case (1936) and Trent Intervenes (1938). Bentley’s contribution was the creation of a more accessible detective, a more human detective. Trent opened the mystery genre’s door to the Everyman.

Mary Roberts Rinehart, the author of the first American detective story to appear on a best-seller list, wrote several successful mystery novels in the early twentieth century. Her books did much to set the stage for authors such as Agatha Christie who followed her. Rinehart’s first mystery novel, The Circular Staircase (1908), sold more than 800,000 copies. A critical and commercial success, it was followed by The Man in Lower Ten (1909) and The Case of Jennie Brice (1913).

Rinehart is credited with coining one of the most ubiquitous catchphrases in the mystery genre: “The butler did it!” It originated in her novel The Door (1930), in which the butler actually did do it. Rinehart is also one of the originators of the “had-I-but-known” school of mystery fiction. This label comes from the frequent repetition of that and similar phrases in her stories.

Trained as a nurse, Rinehart began writing to support her family after the stock market crash of 1903. Many of her works were adapted to other media, especially The Circular Staircase, which Rinehart and Avery Hopwood rewrote for the stage as The Bat. After 1932, she moved to New York to be near her sons who had established the publishing house Farrar and Rinehart, and they published her novels throughout the rest of her life. In 1950, Newsweek reported that Rinehart’s works had sold more than ten million copies worldwide.

Great Britain’s Golden Age

The years between World Wars I and II have been termed the Golden Age of detective fiction because many mystery writers were active during these years and because many of them were of high quality and quite prolific and because of the sheer numbers of mystery novels and short stories in print. The accepted dates of 1920 to 1940 are somewhat arbitrary. Important mystery authors wrote shortly before and after those years. However, it is clear there was a high level of accomplishment in the genre between those designated years in both Great Britain and the United States. In Great Britain, this period was dominated by four women writers: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh.

Discussion of the Golden Age must begin with Agatha Christie, who wrote more than one hundred novels, plays and short-story collections. Her books have sold in the hundreds of millions. Within the Western world, only William Shakespeare and the Bible have had more readers. Moreover, in her two main detective figures, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, Christie created two of the best-known characters in English literature.

Agatha Christie

Born in Devon, England, in 1890 to a British mother and an American father, Christie was the youngest of three children. Schooled at home, she was shy but imaginative. When she was twenty-six, she accepted a challenge from her sister and began writing her first mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), which was initially rejected by several publishers. This first novel introduced Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian detective who would go on to appear in thirty-three novels and sixty-five short stories. In Curtain: Hercule Poirot’s Last Case (1975), Poirot finally dies while working his last case. Christie had actually written Curtain during the early years of World War II, afraid that she herself might be killed and her fictional detective might outlive her. She held the novel back until shortly before her own death over thirty years later.

Christie’s Miss Marple appeared in twelve novels and thirty short stories. She lives in the village of St. Mary Mead, a seemingly quaint and peaceful community. Yet, Marple discovers that people are people wherever one lives, and she is able to classify people she meets by their types, often drawing parallels between new acquaintances and people she has known all her life in St. Mary Mead. Marple is often described as an old tabby, an elderly, unmarried woman. However, behind her disarming facade is a keen mind wielding great powers of observation that silently calculates the evidence. The first novel featuring Miss Marple was The Murder at the Vicarage (1930).

The year 1926 was pivotal for Christie. During that year, her mother died, her first husband left her, she herself disappeared from public view for ten days, sparking a nationwide search and a mystery of her own. It was also the year in which her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) was published. That book broke a cardinal rule of mystery fiction, and readers’ reactions were either surprise or horror upon finishing this Poirot mystery. With her reputation firmly established, Christie went on to write several more high-quality works, both in and out of the Poirot series, including Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937), And Then There Were None (1939), and Evil Under the Sun (1941). Critics have often discounted Christie’s works for their formulaic plots, lack of character development, and unlikely solutions. Christie once even described herself as “a sausage machine.” However, the Queen of Crime or Duchess of Death, as she was affectionately known, has continued to outsell her more literate contemporaries, even thirty years after her death.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Born in Oxford, England, Dorothy L. Sayers earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oxford University. One of the most intellectual of all mystery authors, Sayers was fascinated by the stage, by religion, and by languages. In her later years she abandoned mystery novels in favor of theological treatises, passion plays, and a notable translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (c. 1302). However, Sayers was also a major figure in the history of the mystery genre, not only for her own mystery novels but also for her commentaries on mystery and detective fiction. She wrote a dozen novels and two dozen short stories in fifteen years. Her first mystery novel, Whose Body (1923), introduced Lord Peter Wimsey. Wimsey was an aristocrat, a dandy, an overeducated, highly cultured, long-winded snob. With his monocle, fine clothes, and passions for fast cars and excellent port, Wimsey was an amateur detective with both intelligence and style.

Little violence occurs in a Wimsey novel. People die, but the blood and gore are ignored in favor of the motivations of the characters involved in the story and especially Wimsey’s interactions with other characters. Light, airy, intelligent, sophisticated banter is the meat of most Wimsey novels. Readers have their curiosity piqued, their minds engaged, and eventually their hearts charmed by Wimsey’s ways. In Strong Poison (1930), Wimsey works to free a woman named Harriet Vane from a charge of murder. Vane and Wimsey develop a romance that continues on in four of the final seven books in the series. Sayers wanted to end the series, but she was persuaded by friends to give Wimsey a companion, a family, and a decent sendoff before retiring him. Some of the best of Sayers’s work appears when Vane takes center stage. Gaudy Night (1935) is a book in which Vane appears particularly prominently.

Sayers’s books stand in sharp contrast to those of Christie. While reading Christie provides an afternoon’s pleasant diversion, reading Sayers creates a long-term relationship. Sayers’s plots are sometimes overly complex, as in the novel Have His Carcase (1932), or deal in arcane, obscure subject matter that demands considerable explanation on the part of author and genuine interest and patience on the part of readers, as in The Nine Tailors (1934), a novel dealing with the art of bell ringing.

Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh

Appearing in seventeen novels and more than twenty short stories, Albert Campion evolved from “a silly ass” to a seasoned sleuth in nearly forty years of Margery Allingham’s writing. Campion first appeared as a minor character in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929) but came to be the major and central character in Mystery Mile, Allingham’s next novel. Over the years, Campion gets married, has children, and matures. Central to the Campion series is his manservant, Magersfontein Lugg. Lugg is a former cat burglar, and he and Campion engage in verbal jousts that are as memorable as those of Lord Wimsey and Harriet Vane. Two of the better titles in the Campion series are The Fashion in Shrouds (1938) and More Work for the Undertaker (1948). Allingham’s Campion novels, like those in Sayers’s Wimsey series, mix crime, humor, and manners. Campion seems to float from one world to the next, fitting in equally well with both the aristocracy and the underworld element. He is a somewhat shadowy figure who combines equal parts of charm and menace.

Although Ngaio Marsh was a New Zealander, the settings in her mystery novels were most often in the English countryside and frequently dealt with the arts. Marsh was a theater enthusiast, a dramatic director of skill, and a painter of considerable merit. These passions are on display to one extent or another in many of her novels, either as a central theme, a setting, or as background. She wrote thirty-two mystery novels, all featuring the same detective, Roderick Alleyn.

Alleyn is Oxford educated, and he eventually marries his love interest the painter Agatha Troy and has a family. He is joined on most of his cases by Inspector Edward, or Teddy, Fox, often referred to as B’rer Fox by Alleyn. Nigel Bathgate, another frequent Alleyn associate, is a brash, aggressive newspaper reporter who sometimes proves useful to Scotland Yard. Unlike Albert Campion and Peter Wimsey, Alleyn is a professional police detective. Marsh’s novels usually introduce the murder first, creating characters with motives, exposing the relationships among the characters, killing off one of the characters, and then finally bringing in Alleyn and his associates. Alleyn often does not arrive until a hundred pages of a novel have passed. He first appeared in the novel A Man Lay Dead (1934) and was last seen in Light Thickens (1982). In nearly fifty years of writing, Marsh never tired of Alleyn, who almost always re-creates crimes using the evidence and eyewitness testimony.

America’s Golden Age

While Great Britain’s Golden Age centered on a blend of murder, humor, and manners primarily made popular by women, it was men in the United States who wrote about quirky male characters such as Philo Vance, Dr. Gideon Fell, and Nero Wolfe. Five male authors dominated this period: S. S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Rex Stout.

S. S. Van Dine was the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright. Van Dine’s detective, Philo Vance, like Lord Peter Wimsey, is erudite, elegant, and snobbish. He was introduced in Van Dine’s first mystery novel, The Benson Murder Case, in 1926 and appeared in eleven more novels through 1939. Van Dine himself was well educated and traveled extensively; his personal life, including his expensive tastes, mirrored that of his private eye. In addition to his Vance novels, Van Dine is remembered for his “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” (1928). Like all rules, however, Van Dine’s rules were made to be broken, and most have been broken by other authors.

Ellery Queen was the pen name of cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee. Queen is both a pen name and the name of the main character in a series of novels stretching over forty years. The character debuted in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) and continued in more than thirty novels and several short-story collections. Ellery Queen books lay out all the clues readers need to solve the cases themselves. At the end of each novel, readers are challenged to come up with the correct solution before it is revealed. Early Ellery Queen novels mimicked the successful Philo Vance. Like Vance and Wimsey, Queen is well educated and snobbish. Young Ellery, son of Inspector Richard Queen, is always getting involved in his father’s cases. Inspector Queen’s irascible assistant, Sergeant Velie, provides a balance to Queen’s haughtiness. An important contribution of Ellery Queen’s was Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, an important outlet for young mystery writers.

John Dickson Carr invented a number of detectives, perhaps the most notable being Dr. Gideon Fell, an obese lexicographer who appears in Carr’s best-known work, The Three Coffins (1935). Other Carr detectives include Sir Henry Merrivale, Henri Bencolin, and Colonel March. Carr wrote under a variety of pen names including Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn. His specialty was locked-room mysteries. He was influenced by Gaston Leroux and G. K. Chesterton, who wrote the Father Brown mysteries.

The prolific American writer Erle Stanley Gardner wrote 127 books, 82 of which feature attorney Perry Mason. Other series characters created by Gardner included Bob Larkin, Ed Jenkins, Speed Dash, Bertha Cool, and Donald Lam. With his loyal secretary Della Street and his able investigator Paul Drake, Mason engineers numerous courtroom miracles to the dismay of prosecutor Hamilton Berger. Described as a paid gladiator for his clients, Mason was immortalized to generations of television viewers through the popular television series and television movies starring Raymond Burr.

Rex Stout was a successful businessman before he began writing mystery novels. Born in Indiana to Quaker parents, he was a committed liberal and an original member of the American Civil Liberties Union board. His first mystery novel, Fer-de-Lance (1934), introduced the rotund, beer-drinking, orchid-growing, gourmand Nero Wolfe and his live-in associate, the skirt-chasing, wise-cracking Archie Goodwin. Working together until Stout’s death in 1975, Wolfe and Goodwin appeared in more than thirty novels and as many collected novels and short stories. Although Wolfe seldom leaves his New York brownstone for any reason, he sends out Goodwin and other assistants to gather clues and interview witnesses. From the comfort of his study, Wolfe closes his eyes and pieces together the evidence that is brought back to him. Police detectives are both awed by and resentful of Wolfe’s powers of deduction, and Wolfe’s short temper and arrogant manner does not endear him to authorities.

Hard-Boiled and Noir Fiction

Magazines such as Black Mask and True Detective Stories were springboards to American mystery writers of the late 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s. Many of these writers created characters known as hard-boiled detectives—men with personal honor and integrity who lived by their own rules in a corrupt society. Dialogue in their stories tends to be terse, witty, and rapid. Women are vixens, tramps, and dames out to defile the heroes and lead them away from truth. Among the authors who epitomized this new style were Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Ross Macdonald, and Mickey Spillane.

Noir fiction was even darker, with stories often told from the viewpoint of killers or characters sympathetic to the killers. Cornell Woolrich was one of the best of this breed. During the 1930’s and 1940’s, he wrote a series of dark novels that demonstrate this trend. A second writer in this vein was Jim Thompson, whose The Killer Inside Me (1952) portrays an unrepentant sociopath.

Dashiell Hammett’s stark, minimalist writing style had an influence on later noir and crime fiction that cannot be overstated. Two of his major characters, the nameless Continental Op and Sam Spade, set the standard for private detectives to come. The originator of the hard-boiled school of writing, Hammett wrote nearly ninety short stories in magazines but only five mystery novels: The Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1934). Before he took up writing, Hammett had worked as a detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco for several years. An alcoholic and a chain smoker, he suffered from tuberculosis. Although he lived another twenty-five years, he never wrote another short story or book after 1934.

Equally important to the hard-boiled school was Hammett’s contemporary Raymond Chandler, an author who did much to establish “West Coast cool.” Born in Chicago and raised and educated in England, Chandler served in the Canadian army and returned to the United States after a seventeen-year absence and settled in California. He did not begin writing mystery novels until he was forty-two. His detective was Philip Marlowe, perhaps the best representation of the hard-boiled detective. A private detective, Marlowe is a smooth operator, an independent contractor who would never compromise his personal code. He first appeared in The Big Sleep (1939), the first of Chandler’s seven novels. The best of the rest are Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943), and The Long Goodbye (1953). Like Hammett, Chandler also wrote dozens of short stories for magazines such as Dime Detective and Black Mask. Chandler also had success in Hollywood writing screenplays.

James M. Cain was the son of a college president and was trained as a journalist. He worked in New York City with Walter Lippman and in Baltimore with H. L. Mencken. Like Chandler, Cain took to writing mysteries when he was forty-two. Cain’s first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), is one of the most critically acclaimed novels in the genre. Along with Double Indemnity (1936) and Mildred Pierce (1941), Postman makes up a trio of commercially successful novels. All three books were made into popular films.

Ross Macdonald was the pen name of Kenneth Millar, who was born in California and educated in Canada and at the University of Michigan. After returning to California, he settled in Santa Barbara. Most of his books are set in and around Santa Barbara, which he calls Santa Teresa in his books. A committed conservationist, Macdonald changed his name so as not to conflict with the writing career of his wife, Margaret Millar, who was also a successful mystery novelist. He initially used the pen name John Ross Macdonald but then changed it to Ross Macdonald to avoid confusion with yet another contemporary writer, John D. MacDonald. Ross Macdonald’s main character, Lew Archer, first appeared in The Moving Target in 1949 and was the central character in eighteen novels.

Mickey Spillane took all the elements of the hard-boiled school and exaggerated them to almost disturbing proportions. In what Ellery Queen once termed the “guts, gore and gals” style, Spillane caused a sensation with his first Mike Hammer book, I, the Jury (1947). Spillane thought of himself as a “writer,” not an “author,” because it is the writers who sell books, and he sold millions of books. With titles such as My Gun Is Quick (1950) and Kiss Me Deadly (1952), Spillane cemented his image as a no-nonsense tough guy.

Cornell Woolrich is remembered for his dark, brooding, cynical, and somehow romantic noir fiction. He reached his zenith as a writer with his Black series, which include The Bride Wore Black (1940), The Black Curtain (1941), The Black Alibi (1942), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944), and Rendezvous in Black (1948). Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film Rear Window (1954) was based on Woolrich’s short story “It Had to Be Murder.”

Bibliography

Bianculli, David. Dictionary of Teleliteracy: Television’s Five Hundred Biggest Hits, Misses, and Events. New York: Continuum, 1996. Lively and often incisive discussions of hundreds of television series, including many crime shows, by a veteran television critic.

Haycraft, Howard. Murderfor Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984. This is one of the definitive works of criticism for mystery and detective fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 to hard-boiled fiction in 1941.

Haycraft, Howard, ed. The Art of the Mystery. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1983. Collection of important essays and criticisms of mystery and detective fiction compiled by Haycraft and accompanied by his commentaries.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Klein traces the rise of women amateur sleuths and hard-boiled modern female police detectives.

Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Knight’s work covers the development of crime fiction from its beginnings to the postmodern era.

Murch, A. E. The Development of the Detective Novel. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. Murch recognizes the contributions of writers Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens and less-credited authors’ work in the genre, including Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.

Nickerson, Catherine Ross. The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Examination of early American women writers, including Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, Anna Katharine Green, and Mary Roberts Rinehart.

Peterson, Audrey. Victorian Masters of Mystery: From Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. This work primarily covers the authors named in the title, plus Charles Dickens, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and to lesser extent Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Anna Katharine Green.

Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell. New York: Palgrave, 2001. This work covers the Golden Age of detective fiction women authors in Britain: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, P. D. James, and Ruth Rendell.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. 3d ed. New York: Mysterious Press, 1992. Chapters on the history of mystery and detective fiction cover the Golden Age, the rise of hard-boiled fiction in America, the development of the police procedural, and the relationship of the spy novel to the genre.

Walton, Priscilla L., and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. This book discusses the transformation of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel from a man’s book to a woman’s book.