The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  The story in South America was much the same as in Europe. In Latin Blood (1972), Donald A. Yates pointed out that the success of Edgar Allan Poe and Doyle prompted Alberto Edwards to create Roman Calvo, dubbed ‘the Chilean Sherlock Holmes’, and quoted Abel Mateo, an Argentinian writer whose work was influenced by Ellery Queen, as saying: ‘For me, one of the requirements of the detective story is an Anglo-Saxon background…just as the picaresque novel has to be told in Spain.’ But Mateo’s fellow countrymen, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares led the way in writing stories with a distinctive Latin American flavour.

  Taro Hirai played a leading role in developing Japanese detective fiction, writing under the name Edogawa Rampo, which was itself a tribute to English-language detective fiction, being a corruption of ‘Edgar Allan Poe’. His first mystery story, ‘The Two-Sen Copper Coin’, appeared in 1923; as John Apostolou noted in Murder in Japan (1987), this is ‘generally accepted as the first detective story written in the Japanese language. However, many Japanese crime stories…were written before 1923. In fact, Japanese crime fiction can be traced back to the seventeenth century.’ Hirai’s work influenced successors, and although the Second World War saw the writing of mysteries banned by the Japanese government, in 1947 he formed the Detective Authors’ Club, which later became the Mystery Writers of Japan.

  From uncertain, and often derivative, beginnings, foreign crime writers grew rapidly in confidence, and their work became increasingly important. Julian Symons devoted a whole chapter of Bloody Murder to Simenon (whose work influenced such English-speaking authors as Alan Hunter, Gil North, W.J. Burley and John Banville, who writes crime fiction as Benjamin Black). The leading Swiss dramatist Friedrich Durrenmatt digressed occasionally into crime fiction, and The Judge and His Hangman (1950) and The Pledge (1958) were both successfully filmed. The series of ten books about Martin Beck published by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo from 1965 onwards was a highly significant forerunner to the globally popular ‘Scandi-noir’ fiction of Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø and others. Seicho Matsumoto and Shizuko Natsuki led the way in adding depth of characterisation to the ingenious plotting that has become a trademark of Japanese mysteries. There is nothing inferior about the work of these authors, but the debt that they owe to the pioneers of cosmopolitan crime is perhaps yet to be fully appreciated.

  Six Dead Men

  by Stanislas-André Steeman (1931),

  translated by Rosemary Benet

  Tontines feature in crime fiction written by authors ranging from Robert Louis Stevenson to Agatha Christie, and make ideal starting points for the ‘who will be next?’ type of mystery such as Six Dead Men. Half a dozen young men have agreed to spend five years seeking their fortunes all over the world, before returning to Paris to share their gains equally. One by one, they are murdered, presenting a baffling puzzle for Inspector Wenceslas Vorobeitchik to solve. When the detective, nicknamed Wens, reveals all in the final chapter, he begins his explanation in classically enigmatic fashion: ‘what first roused my suspicions was the disappearance of the bedspread’.

  The story’s pace and multiple plot twists were key to its success. The trick at the heart of the novel anticipates a similar device in Agatha Christie’s masterpiece And Then There Were None (1939) the storyline of which was also foreshadowed—in a different way—by a rather less distinguished mystery written before Steeman’s novel. The Invisible Host (1930), filmed in 1934 as The Ninth Guest. This was a collaboration between an American husband-and-wife team, journalist Gwen Bristow and screenwriter Bruce Manning; the story is said to have begun life as a facetious scheme to dispose of a neighbour who played his radio too loudly.

  Six Dead Men won the Grand prix du roman d’aventures, and Steeman was dubbed ‘the Continental Edgar Wallace’. Mention of Steeman in The New Yorker caught the interest of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stephen Vincent Benet, once a well-regarded poet, but today best remembered for his story ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’, which became an Oscar-winning film. Benet recommended the novel to an American publisher, and his wife Rosemary undertook the translation.

  Stanislas-André Steeman was, like Georges Simenon, a French-speaking Belgian born in Liège, who left school young and displayed a precocious talent for writing, working as a journalist before becoming renowned as a crime writer. However, the similarities end there. Steeman’s novels place less emphasis on character and setting, and are more notable for their ingenuity. The puzzles are clever, and Steeman’s work displays a commitment to fair play, plotting in the Golden Age manner, and a willingness to experiment mirroring that of his contemporaries in the Detection Club.

  Wens reappeared from time to time over more than a quarter of a century, but is absent from The Murderer Lives at Number Twenty-One (1939), which became the first film made by the distinguished director Henri-Georges Clouzot. Legitimate Défense (1942), a psychological crime story, became Clouzot’s third film, Quai des Orfèvres. Only two of Steeman’s novels were translated into English during his lifetime, which accounts for the neglect his fiction has suffered among Anglo-Saxon commentators on the genre, despite its considerable reputation in continental Europe. The surrealist and poet Adolfo Casais Monteiro, for instance, translated The Murderer Lives at Number Twenty-One into Portuguese, so enthused was he by the surreal quality of Steeman’s writing.

  Steeman’s first crime novel was conceived, rather like Trent’s Last Case, with humorous intent. He and fellow journalist Herman Sartini, who used the pen-name Sintair, co-authored The Mystery at Antwerp Zoo (1928) as a parody of the genre’s conventions. They sent it to a French publisher who took the story seriously; after he published it, the pair collaborated on three more mysteries before Steeman struck out on his own.

  Pietr the Latvian

  by Georges Simenon (1930), translated by David Bellos

  This short, snappy novel, originally published as a serial in the magazine Ric et Rac, introduced one of the most celebrated of fiction’s police officers. Detective Chief Inspector Jules Maigret is hunting a mysterious fraudster known as Pietr the Latvian. He learns that Pietr (‘extremely clever and dangerous’ according to the official file) is travelling by train to Paris, and heads for the Gare du Nord. When the train arrives, Maigret learns that a body has been found on board.

  Pietr has, it seems, been shot dead, but Maigret is not satisfied. On a hunch, he pursues a passenger from the train to the luxurious Hotel Majestic. Calling himself ‘Mr Oppenheim’, the traveller appears to be hand in glove with a rich couple called the Mortimer-Levingstons. Puzzlingly, he bears a strong resemblance to the description of Pietr—but if he is Pietr, who was the murdered man?

  Maigret’s pursuit of the truth becomes relentless after one of his colleagues is killed. A plot twist about identity was well worn even in 1930, but the strength of the Maigret stories lies in the spare writing rather than the puzzles. Above all, the appeal of the books lies in the portrayal of a detective who is extraordinary in his relentless ordinariness: ‘his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man. Iron muscles shaped his jacket sleeves and quickly wore through new trousers. He had a way of imposing himself just by standing there…It was something more than self-confidence but less than pride…His pipe was nailed to his jawbone. He wasn’t going to remove it just because he was in the lobby of the Majestic.’

  The setting is painted with crisp, economical brush strokes, and the wind and rain chasing Maigret as he closes in on his quarry match the bleakness of the storyline. Maigret disguises himself, but ‘Maigret in make-up was still Maigret in some aspect of his being—in a glance or a tic.’ It is while wondering about Pietr’s ability to inhabit more than one persona that he cracks the case. His genius as a detective is unglamorous but effective: ‘what he waited and watched out for was the crack in the wall. In other words, the instant when the human being came out from behind the opponent.’

  Maigret was eventually to appear i
n no fewer than 75 novels and 28 short stories. Julian Symons contrasted ‘the realism of the character and background and the sensationalism of the plots…One is disconcerted by things in Simenon that can be taken for granted in John Dickson Carr…The art of Simenon lies in making the implausible acceptable.’ Maigret is French, but Georges Joseph Christian Simenon was born in Belgium, and worked as a journalist, writing fiction under a pen-name, prior to establishing himself as an astonishingly productive crime novelist. His non-series work included highly successful ‘romans durs’, such as The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (1938), The Strangers in the House (1940), and Dirty Snow (1948).

  Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi

  by H. Bustos Domecq, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni (1942)

  Often cited as Argentina’s first home-grown book of detective stories, this collection of tales was an early collaboration between Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. The playfulness of the half-dozen mysteries, in keeping with the finest traditions of Golden Age fiction, is underlined by their choice of surname for their detective. A foreword contributed by Gervasio Montenegro (‘Member, Argentine Academy of Letters’), who pays tribute to ‘the blood-curdling cruelties of the roman policier’, and talks about Sherlock Holmes, Lecoq and Max Carrados, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, M.P. Shiel and Baroness Orczy. Even John Dickson Carr and Lynn Brock earn a mention. Montenegro has no hesitation in putting the book ‘on the same level as those recommended to keen London enthusiasts by the incorruptible Crime Club’.

  Before coming to the end of the essay, readers will have deduced that Montenegro is a figment of the authors’ imagination, and he becomes a character in their stories. In similar vein, a biographical note about H. Bustos Domecq supplied by a schoolteacher, Miss Adelina Badoglio, ends with the ironic claim that the stories ‘are not the filigree of a Byzantine locked in an ivory tower but are the voice of a true contemporary, who is sensitive to the human pulsebeat and from whose generous heart flows the torrent of his truths’. In-jokes abound; some are lost on a modern British reader, while Montenegro’s anti-Semitism represents the authors’ scorn for racism; Nazi-supporting extremists had previously suggested that Borges was secretly Jewish, and not a ‘true’ Argentinian.

  Parodi is introduced in ‘The Twelve Figures of the World’ as a victim of a miscarriage of justice which, for the authors, typifies corruption in Argentina. Fourteen years earlier, a butcher taking part in a carnival parade was killed by a blow on the head inflicted by the member of a gang, but the police found a convenient scapegoat in Parodi, whom ‘some claimed was an anarchist, by which they meant an oddball’. He was neither, just the owner of a barbershop who was owed a year’s rent by a police clerk. The gang members’ false evidence led to his conviction, and Parodi was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison: ‘He was now in his forties, sententious and fat, and had a shaved head and unusually wise eyes.’

  Parodi never leaves his cell, but proves to be a master of armchair detection, solving the weird problems brought to him, including one puzzle, ‘Tai An’s Long Search’, which is dedicated to the memory of Ernest Bramah, and amounts to a variation on Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’. Another story, ‘Tadeo Limardo’s Victim’, is dedicated to Franz Kafka, while characters are named after Father Brown, and Wilkie Collins’ most memorable villain, Count Fosco.

  Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges became one of Argentina’s most distinguished men of letters. His love of detective fiction is reflected in his reviews, as well as intriguing and much-admired stories such as ‘Death and the Compass’ and ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. Adolfo Bioy Casares, also a writer and translator of distinction, became a close friend of Borges. The pair collaborated regularly, often under the Domecq pseudonym, and in 1943, they produced an anthology of crime fiction featuring the work of fellow countrymen alongside that of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The Way Ahead

  Crime fiction evolved during the first half of the twentieth century, and has kept evolving ever since, because the genre responds to changes in the world at large. Just as the pioneering work of Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle paved the way for the classic crime fiction discussed in this book, so the stories written by early Detection Club members and their contemporaries have exerted an influence on their successors. This is so despite the fact that some attitudes evinced in classic crime stories seem at best dated, and at worst intolerable.

  At first glance, Agatha Christie’s work may seem parochial, even though her settings are, in geographical terms, extraordinarily varied. Yet the universal nature of the behaviours at play in her mysteries contributes to their long-lasting global appeal. Readers can recognise the humanity in Christie’s retired colonels and flighty housemaids, even if they have never encountered a retired colonel or housemaid in their lives. Death Comes as the End (1944), set in ancient Egypt, illustrates her strengths as well as her limitations. The characters are not portrayed in depth, but the emotions that drive their actions seem equally powerful in modern times. The novel is also an example of Christie’s knack of anticipating trends; when the book was first published, historical mysteries were uncommon. Now they crowd bookshop shelves.

  Psychology is frequently mentioned in Golden Age mysteries, although often its treatment is superficial. Anthony Berkeley was right to identify the ‘puzzle of character’ as the central theme for exploration in crime fiction, although to this day other forms of puzzle retain a pull on readers. Golden Age writers’ love of playing games led them to experiment with tricky structures for their story-telling. Christie, Berkeley and Nicholas Blake deployed unreliable narrators with great skill, even in novels featuring their Great Detectives of the traditional kind. Although most of Richard Hull’s structural experiments commanded less attention, his witty and inventive stories demonstrated the almost endless range of possible ways for telling a story about crime. Clever writers used multiple viewpoints, so effective long before in The Moonstone, to achieve different effects—to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes in Robert Player’s The Ingenious Mr Stone, to help amplify a theme in The Documents in the Case or to supply insight into character in Birthday Party.

  As the high spirits of the Twenties gave way to a darker mood, crime writers responded to changes taking place in the world around them. By the early to mid Forties, the Golden Age was to all intents and purposes at an end. Dorothy L. Sayers, Berkeley, Ronald Knox, R.C. Woodthorpe and Rupert Penny, among others, had all stopped writing detective novels. Their place was taken by a new generation of writers, some of whom produced highly ingenious mysteries. In the vanguard were Christianna Brand, Michael Gilbert, Edmund Crispin, and even, for a short time in the Fifties, Anthony and Peter Shaffer, identical twin brothers who later became famous as playwrights. They in turn were followed by the likes of P.D. James, Robert Barnard, and Colin Dexter accomplished storytellers who understood the value of strong plotting and a commitment to entertaining the reader.

  The newcomers also included Shelley Smith and Margot Bennett, whose perspectives on politics and social issues were very different from those of Christie and Sayers. Smith and Bennett found their feet as novelists in the Forties, and Bennett’s characteristically witty and clever debut, Time to Change Hats (1945), struck a distinctive note from the start, with a dedication ‘To my creditors’ and a first paragraph beginning ‘It is difficult to become a private detective; the only recognised way is to be a friend of the corpse. My friends were disobliging’. They proceeded to produce some of the finest British crime novels of the Fifties, including Smith’s dazzling An Afternoon to Kill (1953) and Bennett’s very different but equally original The Man Who Didn’t Fly (1955).

  Julian Symons’ praise for both women in Bloody Murder helped to maintain their reputations; his career followed a roughly similar pattern to theirs, but lasted much longer. He first tried his hand at
crime fiction after working out a plot for a satiric mystery with his friend Ruthven Todd. Todd, a poet and artist, did none of the writing, although he later produced a handful of mysteries at great speed under the name R.T. Campbell as a money-making exercise; his series detective, Professor John Stubbs, bore a strong resemblance to John Dickson Carr’s principal sleuths, Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale. Years later, after leaving the army, Symons sent the novel to a publisher, and The Immaterial Murder Case finally appeared in 1945. Partly because of its inferior quality, and partly because Todd objected to the caricature of him, Symons never allowed the book to be reprinted, but many of his later novels achieved distinction. His advocacy on behalf of the modern psychological crime novel was even more influential than his fiction.

  Symons’ work included whodunits in the classic mould, novels inspired by real-life crimes, historical mysteries and Sherlockian pastiche. His contemporary Michael Gilbert’s first novel was also begun before the Second World War and not published until after its end. Gilbert demonstrated similar versatility as well as a high level of professionalism, and an unyielding commitment to writing entertaining storiest. Neither man became a household name, perhaps because of their failure to create a truly memorable series character, but together they led the way in exploring the possibilities of the well-made British crime novel.

  Before he died, Symons had the satisfaction of knowing that his crusade had ‘been won in the sense that…Highsmith, Le Carré, and Sjowall and Wahloo, along with some other writers are now treated as serious novelists’. He was also wise enough to recognise that the success was not, and will not, be total. But he probably underestimated the range, quality, and durability of classic crime fiction, and like many others, he would no doubt be astonished by its recent resurgence in popularity.