Great Detectives

by Otto Penzler

  There would be consternation shown by agents and publishers when, after another couple of jobs, the lady accepted him, but the acceptance would be a fait accompli and from then on I would be dealing with a married investigator, his celebrated wife, and later on, their son.

  By a series of coincidences and much against his inclination, it would come about that these two would occasionally get themselves embroiled in his professional duties, but generally speaking he would keep his job out of his family life and set about his cases with his regular associate who is one of his closest friends. Inspector Fox, massive, calm, and plain-thinking, would tramp sedately in. They have been working together for a considerable time and still allow me to accompany them.

  But “on the afternoon in question” all this, as lady crime-novelists used to say, “lay in the future.” The fire had burned clear and sent leaping patterns up the walls of my London flat when I turned on the light, opened a twopenny exercise book, sharpened my pencil, and began to write. There he was, waiting quietly in the background ready to make his entrance at Chapter IV, page 58 in the first edition.

  I had company. It became necessary to give my visitor a name.

  Earlier in that week I had visited Dulwich College. This is an English public school, which in any other country would mean a private school. It was founded and very richly endowed by a famous actor in the days of the first Elizabeth. It possesses a splendid picture gallery and a fabulous collection of relics from the Shakespearean-Marlovian theater: enthralling to me who have a passion for that scene.

  My father was an old boy of Dulwich College—an “old Alleynian” as it is called, the name of the Elizabethan actor being Alleyn.

  Detective-Inspector Alleyn, C.I.D.? Yes.

  His first name was in doubt for some time but another visit, this time to friends in the Highlands of Scotland, had familiarized me with some resoundingly christened characters, among them one Roderick (or Rory) MacDonald.

  Roderick Alleyn, Detective-Inspector, C.I.D.?

  Yes.

  The name, by the way, is pronounced “Allen.”

  John Appleby

  Michael Innes

  AS ONE OF THE most erudite of all detectives, particularly of those officially connected with a police department, John Appleby of Scotland Yard was uniquely suited to handle his first recorded case, a murder at Oxford University. And, although many of his subsequent cases have also involved academic settings—with their inevitable academicians—he is never intimidated. To the contrary. Appleby’s education has apparently been so extensive (if less formal than that of the professors with whom he deals so competently) that he amuses himself by quoting appropriate lines from the classics at opportune moments.

  Appleby is not an effete amateur, dabbling in detective work because he thinks it good sport. He began his police career as a uniformed bobby and rapidly progressed through the ranks of inspector, assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard and ultimately, commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police. He was knighted just before retiring to a not very serene life punctuated with frequent criminal encounters.

  Michael Innes began writing detective fiction as an escape from a more sober professorial life. Recently retired, he was known to students of literature at Christ Church College of Oxford University as Professor J. I. M. Stewart, Reader in English Literature, under which name he has produced numerous scholarly studies and biographies. Curiously, the 71-year-old creator of one of mystery fiction’s most memorable detectives believes that in-depth characterization is inimical to crime fiction. Professor Stewart also considers the reading of detective novels addictive and decided to fight the disease by writing his own.

  John Appleby

  by Michael Innes

  JOHN APPLEBY CAME INTO being during a sea voyage from Liverpool to Adelaide. Ocean travel was a leisured affair in those days, and the route by the Cape of Good Hope took six weeks to cover. By that time I had completed a novel called Death at the President’s Lodging (Seven Suspects in the U.S.A.) in which a youngish inspector from Scotland Yard solves the mystery of the murder of Dr. Umpleby, the president of one of the constituent colleges of Oxford University. It is an immensely complicated murder, and Appleby is kept so busy getting it straight that he has very little leisure to exhibit himself to us in any point of character or origins. But these, in so far as they are apparent, derive, I am sure, from other people’s detective stories. I was simply writing a yarn to beguile a somewhat tedious experience—and in a popular literary kind at that time allowable as an occasional diversion even to quite serious and even learned persons, including university professors, (It was to become a rather juvenile university professor that I was making this trek to the Antipodes.)

  Appleby arrives in Oxford in a “great yellow Bentley”—which suggests one sort of thriller writing, not of the most sophisticated sort. But “Appleby’s personality seemed at first thin, part effaced by some long discipline of study, like a surgeon whose individuality has concentrated itself within the channels of a unique operative technique.” This is altogether more highbrow, although again not exactly original. And Appleby goes on to show himself quite formidably educated, particularly in the way of classical literature. “The fourteen bulky volumes of the Argentorati Athenaeus” (and for that matter Schweighaüser’s edition of the Deipnosophists) he takes quite in his stride when he encounters them in Dr. Umpleby’s study. This must be regarded as a little out of the way in a London bobby lately off the beat. And there is no sign that Appleby is other than this; he is not the newfangled sort of policeman (if indeed such then existed) recruited from a university. Research in this volume will show that he is definitely not himself an Oxford man. This has frequently been a contentious issue, and I fear that the evidence becomes a shade confused in some later chronicles.

  What Appleby does possess in this early phase of his career is (I am inclined to think) a fairly notable power of orderly analysis. Had he been a professor himself, he would have made a capital expository lecturer. But I am far from claiming that he long retains this power; later on he is hazardously given to flashes of intuition, and to picking up clues on the strength of his mysteriously acquired familiarity with recondite artistic and literary matters. He also becomes rather fond of talking, or at least of frequenting the society of persons who prefer amusing conversation to going through the motions of being highly suspicious characters, much involved with low life and criminal practice.

  What I am claiming here (the reader will readily perceive) is that Appleby is as much concerned to provide miscellaneous and unassuming “civilized” entertainment as he is to hunt down baddies wherever they may lurk. And I think this must be why he has proved fairly long-lived: and by this I mean primarily long-lived in his creator’s imagination. In forty years I have never quite got tired of John Appleby as a pivot round which farce and mild comedy and parody and freakish fantasy revolve.

  If I finished the first of these stories before reaching Australia, I think I am right in my reckoning when I say that I had written a dozen of them before coming away again ten years later. This suggests more application than, I fear, actually went into the activity; one is rather freely inventive when one is young, and the stories seemed to get themselves on the page out of odd corners of my mind at odd times and seasons. I never brooded over them as I was to brood over ordinary “straight” novels later; and here I was only being faithful to that first ethos of the “classical” English detective story as a diversion to be lightly offered and lightly received. Yet the circumstances of my diurnal life and my immediate physical and social surroundings during those years must have had some impact upon them. Where did this lie?

  I think a species of naive nostalgia was at work. English life and manners had a compelling fascination for me—and the more so because, as a Scot who had scarcely crossed the border as a boy, my experience of them had been comparatively brief. And at once keen but impressionistic! So as Appleby moves through his early adventures he reflects
something of this situation. He is within a society remembered rather than observed—and remembered in terms of literary conventions which are themselves distancing themselves as his creator works. His is an expatriate’s world. It is not a real world, controlled by actual and contemporary social pressures, any more than is, say, the world of P. G. Wodehouse.

  But the sphere of Appleby’s operations is conditioned by other and, as it were, more simply technical factors. Why does he move, in the main, through great houses and amid top people: what an Englishman might call the territory of Who’s Who? It might be maintained that it is just because he likes it that way. We never learn quite where he comes from. He has a sister who has been an undergraduate at Oxford, and an aunt of somewhat imperious aristocratic manners who lives in Harrogate; he has married into an eccentric family, the Ravens, who are country gentry. But wherever he comes from (and it appears to me to be some quite simple station of life), he is a highly assimilative person, who moves, or has learned to move, with complete assurance in any society. Eventually he makes a very convincing commissioner of Metropolitan Police, which is Britain’s highest job in a police service. I’m not sure that he isn’t more verisimilar in this role than he is as a keen young detective crawling about the floor looking for things. So one might aver that he finds his way into all those august dwellings because he fancies life that way.

  But this isn’t quite the fact of the matter. In serious English fiction, as distinct from a fiction of entertainment, the great house has long been a symbol—or rather a microcosm—of ordered society; of a complex, but on the whole harmonious, community. And indeed French, Russian, and American novelists have tended to see life that way; in the “English” novel the grandest houses of all have been invented by Henry James.

  Something of this has rubbed off on the novel’s poor relation, the detective story—the more readily, perhaps, because in England itself that sort of story was in its heyday rather an upper-class addiction.

  But Appleby, like many of his fellow-sleuths in the genre, roams those great houses for a different and, as I have said, technical reason. The mansion, the country seat, the ducal palace, is really an extension of the sealed room, defining the spatial, the territorial boundaries of a problem. One can, of course, extract a similar effect out of a compact apartment or a semidetached villa. But these are rather cramping places to prowl in. And in detective stories detectives and their quarry alike must prowl. At the same time, they mustn’t get lost. And this fairly spacious unity, the Unity of Place in Aristotle’s grand recipe for fiction, conduces to an observance of those other unities of time and action which hold a fast-moving story together. And just because Appleby is leisured and talkative, urbane and allusive; just because he moves among all those people with plenty to say themselves; just because of this he wisely seeks out that rather tight ambiance.

  There is one other point that strikes me about him as I leaf through his chronicles. They are chronicles in the sense that time is flowing past in them at least in one regard. The social scene may be embalmed in that baronets abound in their libraries and butlers peer out of every pantry. But Appleby himself ages, and in some respects perhaps even matures. He ages along with his creator, and like his creator ends up as a retired man who still a little meddles with the concerns of his green unknowing youth.

  Lew Archer

  Ross Macdonald

  ROSS MACDONALD’S PRIVATE-EYE stories reflect our time. It is difficult to know precisely what drives Lew Archer. A sense of chivalry and honor, surely, yet he strays easily and frequently. Justice, yes, but his own definition of it. Paradox and mystery obscure the outlines of his personality. What does Archer look like? Macdonald says he doesn’t know; he’s never thought about it. Is he based on a real-life character? Yes, he admits, himself, but not completely. Is Paul Newman’s portrayal accurate? Well, says Macdonald, he is a wonderful Harper but Harper is not Archer.

  Read the short stories and novels, and you will find a few clues to the real Lew Archer: what he thinks, how he acts, what his intentions are, what his destiny is. But Macdonald writes about him indirectly, always, as if triple-thick gauze had been placed over the camera lens. A little more about this lonely “underground man” emerges in Ross Macdonald’s essay. Like the author’s Lew Archer stories, the image of the Los Angeles private detective is a glimpse through a fog, rather than a studio portrait.

  Ross Macdonald is the most honored active American writer of detective fiction. Writing in the New York Times, William Goldman described the Lew Archer series as “the best detective novels ever written by an American”; he has been the subject of a Newsweek cover story; he has received a coveted Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America; and his is that rare detective writing reviewed and treated as “serious” fiction by critics. Born Kenneth Millar, the 62-year-old author adopted his famous pseudonym in 1949 to avoid confusion with his wife, mystery writer Margaret Millar. They live in Santa Barbara, California.

  Lew Archer

  by Ross Macdonald

  IN THE EARLY MONTHS of 1929, when I was thirteen, the most important figure in my imaginative life was Falcon Swift the Monocled Manhunter. Swift was a fictional detective who was regularly featured in the Boys’ Magazine, a thin pulp magazine with a pink cover which was imported from England and sold for five cents a copy. I bought it every Saturday at a little store on North Main Street in Winnipeg, across the street from the semi-military school where I passed the long Manitoba winter.

  The school library was open only on Sunday afternoons. But my nights were enlivened by Falcon Swift’s war on evil, his hundred-mile-an-hour journeys by high-powered car across the green face of England, the harsh justice which he meted out to criminals. Reluctant to leave Falcon Swift at Lights Out, I rigged up a mirror which reflected the light from the hallway onto my pillow and enabled me to read, with some difficulty, far into the night.

  The stock market crash which took me out of the school in Winnipeg may have saved my eyesight. I never saw another Boys’ Magazine or heard of Falcon Swift again. But for good or ill he had left his mark on me. Fantastic as his adventures undoubtedly were, they prepared me for (as they derived from) Sherlock Holmes’s more cerebral war on evil, Lord Peter Wimsey’s towering egotism, and Sapper’s low blows. Even when James Bond rose like a Sputnik on the horizon, he seemed not wholly unfamiliar. The Monocled Manhunter was riding again, armed like a battle cruiser, rescuing England from evil, domestic and foreign.

  A deeper sense of evil (which I associate with Dickens and Wilkie Collins) has come back into the detective form in more recent decades. It reminds us that we live on the slopes of a volcanic history which may erupt again at any time. The evil we are aware of is both public and terribly personal, like an unruly child or an insane relative who has taken up permanent residence in the basement of our lives. At its very best, where it grazes tragedy and transcends its own conventions, detective fiction can remind us that we are all underground men making a brief transit from darkness to darkness.

  The typical detective hero in contemporary American fiction speaks for our common humanity. He has an impatience with special privilege, a sense of interdependence among men, and a certain modesty. The central vice of the old-fashioned hero like Holmes or Wimsey, who easily accepted their own superiority, is hubris, an overweening pride and expectation. The central vice of the underground man is moral and social sloth, a willingness to live with whatever is, a molelike inclination to accept the darkness. Perhaps these are the respective vices of aristocracy and democracy.

  The private detective is one of the central figures of fiction in which the shift from aristocracy to democracy has visibly occurred, decade by decade. This is true of the real-life detective as well as the fictional, for each imitates the other. The relationship of the imaginary and the actual is further complicated by the fact that fictional detectives tend to be idealized versions of their authors, the kind of men we would choose to be if we were men of action ins
tead of the solitary fantasists we are. Everyone knows this, including the present writer. (“I’m not Archer, exactly, but Archer is me.”) What everyone may not know is the extent to which actual detectives, both privately and publicly employed, read detective stories and watch crime movies for clues as to how to conduct themselves. One reason why detective fiction is important is that it serves as a model for life and action.

  Detectives are human like other men, and the perfect detective will never exist in the flesh. But the several good detectives I have known have certain qualities in common. One is a rather selfless chameleon aspect which allows them to move on various levels of society, ranging from the campus to the slums, and fade in and out of the woodwork on demand. They are able to submerge themselves in the immediate milieu and behave according to its customs and talk the language: a little Spanish in East Los Angeles, a little jive in Watts, a little Levi-Strauss in Westwood. This is something different from the miming of the actor because it is played out in the actual world and is subject to its pressures and uncertainties. The stakes are real.

  One night a few years ago I had a phone call from a man who wanted to come out to my house and talk. I remembered his name. A few years before, as a local university student, he had joined the campus branch of the John Birch Society in order to expose its purposes. Since then, he told me in my study, he had carved out a career as a private detective.

  Perhaps carved is the wrong word. My visitor was gentle in manner, though he told me he knew karate. Over a period of a year or so, in the Bay Area, he had apprehended some fifty criminals. I was surprised by his reason for coming to me. He wanted to establish a code of ethics for private detectives, and thought my Archer stories might serve as a starting point.