Detective Story by W. H. Auden
"Detective Story" is a free-verse poem by W. H. Auden, included in his 1937 work, *Letters from Iceland*, co-authored with Louis MacNeice. The poem, consisting of twenty-seven lines organized into five paragraphs, reflects on the allure of detective stories and the moral implications of engaging with crime and punishment narratives. It opens with a typical setting, where an anonymous man finds himself embroiled in a slowly unraveling mystery, prompting readers to consider how one's environment influences identity and happiness.
As the poem progresses, it delves into the conventional tropes of detective fiction, from the initial crime to the eventual resolution, while subtly shifting focus to the reader's role in the narrative. Auden invites readers to confront their complicity in the enjoyment of fictional suffering, questioning the ethics behind the relief felt when justice is served. The poem concludes with a haunting observation about the price of happiness, suggesting a deeper reflection on the intertwining of morality and entertainment in the realm of crime stories. Through its ambiguous imagery and ironic contrasts, "Detective Story" challenges readers to examine their perspectives on justice and the human condition.
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Detective Story by W. H. Auden
First published: 1937, in Letters from Iceland
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“Detective Story” was first published in Letters from Iceland, a 1937 account by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice of their 1936 trip to Iceland. The book is presented in the form of prose and verse letters to their friends and relatives and to Lord Byron, who was famous for his travels as well as for his poetry. Far from a conventional travel book, Letters from Iceland offers Auden the opportunity to comment on important and trivial matters concerning the world at large.
“Detective Story” appears in a letter to his wife, Erika Mann Auden, as an explanation of “why people read detective stories.” The twenty-seven-line free-verse poem, presented in five verse paragraphs, follows the pattern of the traditional English detective story. The opening paragraph describes a typical setting, either a quiet village or an urban flat, where the “three or four things/ that happen to a man do happen.” The setting or “landscape” in which a person finds himself also defines him, creates the “map of his life,” and marks the spot where he first discovers happiness.
In the second paragraph, the narrator begins wondering about this anonymous man trapped in a slowly unraveling mystery. Whether an “unknown tramp” or a “rich man,” he is an “enigma…with a buried past.” Then the happiness of the first paragraph becomes “our happiness,” suggesting that this apparently shared happiness owes something to “blackmail and philandering.”
The third paragraph hurries through the “traditional” elements of the story, explaining how “all goes to plan,” “down to the thrilling final chase, the kill.” These traditional elements include the murderer’s lies and inevitable confession.
The focus in the final two paragraphs shifts to the mind of the detective story reader. He wonders if the guilty verdict is just, until the execution is carried out, and he then feels relief that justice has been served. According to the narrating sensibility, the murderer has been executed to kill time for the reader. The poem ends with the ambiguous, ominous observation, “Someone must pay for/ our loss of happiness, our happiness itself.”
Forms and Devices
The structure of “Detective Story” is meant to trap the reader just as a fictional detective does a murderer. Auden eases his reader into a formulaic setting with which the reader can identify and fills it with signs of life, only to reveal suddenly that a murder has taken place. Auden’s reader, like the reader of a detective story, feels himself or herself above all this turmoil, only to be dragged down into confronting the morality of taking pleasure in crime and punishment.
Auden uses ambiguous pronoun references to draw the reader into his moral web. The poem opens, “for who is ever quite without his landscape.” The reader clearly is meant to identify with this “who,” with this typical man living an ordinary life in his ordinary dwelling. The deliberate vagueness of Auden’s description also invites identification with this man’s landscape: “The straggling village street, the house in trees,/ all near the church, or else the gloomy town house.” The reader identifies with the happiness of Auden’s anonymous man only to have it become “our happiness” as a result of being entertained by his fictional man’s misery. The focus of the poem becomes not “he” and “his” but “us” and “our.”
Auden’s imagery describes both an everyday world and a world of sin, crime, and death. In the context of the later paragraphs, the “straggling” and “gloomy” of the opening lines assume a more ominous suggestiveness than first appears. The lines “mark the spot/ where the body of his happiness was first discovered” become not a metaphor for an ordinary location but the site of a possible murder. The metaphorical “body” becomes a literal one. Similarly, the “buried past” of the second paragraph suggests both unrevealed truths and a literal burial.
Auden employs ironic juxtaposition with “the thrilling final chase, the kill” to suggest the reader’s duplicity in the death of the murderer. This idea is reinforced by “but time is always killed.” In both instances, “kill” and “killed” appear to be meant metaphorically, but the literal meanings are applicable as well.