by Alex Palmer
Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
A Life of Their Own
On occasion, crime writers have found themselves at the mercy of their own creations. Arthur Conan Doyle famously tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes so he could move on to more serious writing, only to bring him back after immense public pressure, including accusations of having “murdered” the detective.
Agatha Christie described the portly Belgian Hercule Poirot to be a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep,” but could not bring herself to kill him off, saying, “he has to go on because people ask for him so much.”
Leave it to Americans to throw all this out the window. While a fairly conservative approach to solving crime was selling massive quantities of mystery novels in Britain, American writers like Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Dashiell Hammett turned mysteries into something decidedly darker.
Evolving from pulp magazines such as Black Mask which had grown in popularity after World War I, these “hard-boiled” stories gave us detectives, like Hammett’s Sam Spade and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, who live in a stark and violent world. They do not see a clear line between criminals and the law, often engaging in illegal acts themselves in the process of solving crimes.
Hardly the model of genteel reserve, these tough guys were usually on the verge of going broke, and their diets generally consisted of a combination of coffee and cigarettes. They often came to blows with adversaries, but without any talk of professional training. The narrative is similarly shadowy, with cases that begin seeming to be straightforward, but spiral into complicated mazes of strange characters and situations.
Did You Know?
Dashiell Hammett actually worked for several years as a detective for the Pinkerton agency, experiences that would later influence his novels, including The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934). He may have been too good—legend has it that in one case a man he was tailing got lost and Hammett had to offer him directions back to the city.
The hard-boiled camp of crime solving is particularly American in its embrace of the macho rebel who flouts convention and is less interested in maintaining social order than getting paid for his time. The works can also be seen as a return to Poe’s original approach to detective fiction, with its gritty urban environments and focus on the city’s underbelly.
Did You Know?
When a reporter asked T. S. Eliot what he was receiving the Nobel Prize for, Eliot replied that it was for “the entire corpus” of his work. The confused reporter asked, “And when did you publish that?” Eliot said later that The Entire Corpus would make a good title for a mystery.
In recent decades the hard-boiled detectives have cleaned themselves up a little, as “police procedurals” have become the dominant type of detective story. These works, whether in novels like Last Seen Wearing ... (1952) and the later novels of Dennis Lehane and Richard Price (as well as prime-time television shows from Dragnet to Law & Order) look at the details of official investigative techniques, including interrogations, forensics, autopsies, and even paperwork. The heroes are less likely to find themselves in harm’s way, but the works remain much grittier than anything Agatha Christie would write.
Perhaps the most significant trend in detective stories since the end of World War II is that they are often not “detective stories” at all. Instead, writers in the genre are more likely to offer “crime novels,” where character is more significant than plot, often with the reader already knowing who is the killer at the beginning of the story. From true-crime pulps to Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels to “nonfiction novels” including Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965), the killer plays a more prominent role than the detective.
With works like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy dominating bestseller lists, it seems, at least for now, that the detectives are still one step ahead of the criminals.
Be Careful What Company You Keep
Norman Mailer pushed for the publication of convict Jack Henry Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast and then helped to secure his release from prison, only to have Abbot murder a man six weeks later—the day before The New York Times published a rave review of his book. Mailer may have been tough, but his power of observation would have needed some work if he ever wanted to be a detective.
WHAT OTHER UNCONTROLLABLE MONSTER DID DR. FRANKENSTEIN INVENT?
The birth and spread of science fiction
Victor Frankenstein describes the moment when, “the dull yellow eye of the creature open[ed]; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.” Of course, these lines from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein refer to the frightful, unnamed creature the doctor has cobbled together with parts from collected bones and discarded parts. This moment is also when the first spark of life appeared in a nascent literary genre that would develop into an amalgam of romance, horror, and scientific inquiry that its creator could hardly have predicted at the time: science fiction.
Shelley’s work, with a monster devised through scientific research and technical skill, presents science as a source of transcendence at once inspiring and terrifying and set in motion a new way for writers to examine their rapidly changing world.
Early works by Poe, such as The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall (1850), as well as others flitting between journalism and tall tales, set the stage for Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, who would popularize the genre later in the century. After reading Poe in 1856, Jules and Edmond de Goncourt described his work in their Journal des Goncourt as “a new literary world pointing to the literature of the twentieth century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A + B; a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry, but analytic fantasy.” They would prove to be right on the mark.
Verne, a student of geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, wrote works that combined his interests with an adventurous and pioneering spirit. Just as the attention to scientific detail gave the works of Shelley and Poe an element of realism, Verne instilled his novels with at least partly plausible science. Works like A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), and The Mysterious Island (1875) expanded the audience for the growing genre.
No Joke
Aldous Huxley originally conceived of Brave New World (1932) as a parody of H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods (1923).
Wells described his works, such as The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898), as “scientific romances,” reflecting the connection they had to Mary Shelley’s gothic tradition. Incorporating notions of alien planets, new technology, and the possibilities of human invention, his themes would be fundamental to later works in the genre.
“Scientific romance” became “science fiction” in 1926. The man who rechristened it, Hugo Gernsback, was publisher of Amazing Stories, the first of what would be many pulp magazines dedicated to the genre, including Science Wonder Stories and Astounding Science Fiction. For decades, these magazines became the primary outlet for both upcoming and established science fiction authors.
Did You Know?
Gernsback was not particularly generous in paying his writers and a bit shady in his running of the magazine—which is why H. P. Lovecraft dubbed him “Hugo the Rat.” Nonetheless, he would become the namesake for one of science fiction’s most respected awards, the “Hugos.”
Although many of these early stories were exuberant works of adventure set on other planets, sometimes derisively referred to as “space operas,” by the mid-1930s, the anxiety of the Depression and World War II had imparted a more sober approach to the style. The dystopian novels of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1949) were produced outside the science fiction community, but their tone and themes would prove an influence on later works.
For read
ers outside the genre, this culture of pulp magazines stuffed with stories of varying quality seemed quite foreign. During the late 1950s, two prominent authors helped translate this strange world for a more mainstream audience:
In a 1955 talk to Cambridge University, C. S. Lewis commented on the improving quality of the genre, saying that fifteen years before it was “usually detestable; the conceptions, sometimes worthy of better treatments.” But that more recently, “there was an improvement: not that very bad stories cease to be the majority, but that the good ones became better and more numerous.”
Four years later, Kingsley Amis published the ingeniously titled New Maps of Hell, in which he provides a brief history of the genre, offering, “to read, and to study, science fiction are valid and interesting pursuits from any old point of view, whether literary, sociological, psychological, political, or what you will, though the first of these will probably keep you going longer than any of the others.”
The rise of science fiction’s “Big Three”—Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov—firmly established the genre for the twentieth century. Each one made major contributions with crossover appeal to the uninitiated, from Asimov’s 1941 short story “Nightfall” (anthologized some four dozen times), and Heinlein’s politically charged Starship Troopers (1959) to Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End (1953), about the further evolution of the human race, as well as dozens of other works.
Life Imitates Art
Science fiction has also had a history of helping spark innovation and inspiring actual scientists in their efforts. H. G. Wells correctly predicted the invention of wheeled trucks, air conditioning, video recording, propeller airplanes, and television.
Arthur C. Clarke predicted that “personal radios” would be invented in 1980–1990 (a fairly accurate prediction of the Walkman), and that a “global library” would be in existence by the year 2005—not far off from the growth of the Internet.
With the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974), Ursula K. Le Guin established herself as the most significant female voice in the genre since Mary Shelley. Her works use tales of alien cultures to examine human society and explore ideas of sexual identity, earning her interest from feminists.
John Wyndham, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and John Brunner, incorporated a more playful tone into the anxious concerns about science. As the use of computers grew, William Gibson and his fellow cyberpunk writers ushered in an era of dark dystopian visions, which helped to reenergize the genre. Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his Neuromancer (1984). Far from the optimistic “romances,” cyberpunk novels brought a noir pessimism to their accounts of hackers fighting a dismal future.
Did You Know?
The broad appeal of science fiction is apparent in the many writers outside the genre who have used its elements in their writing. Among them are Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle (1963), Doris Lessing in her space fiction series Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983), Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Gore Vidal’s Kalki (1978).
Some of the genre’s biggest contributions to popular culture have been through film adaptations. Just as Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster is one of the first images to come to mind when we hear “Frankenstein,” the works of science fiction writers are constantly adapted into major films, from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) serving as the basis for the blockbuster Blade Runner (1982) to Clarke’s collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick on the critically acclaimed 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to the more recent I Am Legend (2007), based on Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel. While many of these take liberties with their source material, and only occasionally involve the authors creatively in the adaptations, mainstream audiences often first connect with the genre through the big screen.
Like Frankenstein’s monster, science fiction remains something of an outsider to the broader literary world. Rather than worrying about what the Pulitzer committee thinks of the work of the genre’s masters, the science fiction community has developed its own extensive award system. Besides the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in Seattle, Washington, there are also the Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards, John W. Campbell Awards, and Philip K. Dick Awards.
This might help explain why the genre continues to have one of the most passionate and loyal fan bases. Groups such as San Diego–based Darkstar, the male-only Trap Door Spiders (whose members included Isaac Asimov), and Broad Universe (which promotes works by women science fiction writers) cater to the genre’s enthusiastic writers and followers, providing online platforms, conventions, and events where they can meet and discuss their favorite works. Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow calls the genre “perhaps the most social of all literary genres.” While the genre may still reside a bit outside the literary mainstream, this is far from a lonely place.
CONCLUSION: LAST WORDS
We’ll wrap up this volume with a few ways that writers have wrapped up their lives. Though literature’s greats could not choose when they went, many found ways to exit poetically:
Making arrangements for his own funeral, Hans Christian Andersen instructed the musician, “Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps.”
Molière was struck down by tuberculosis while performing his play The Imaginary Invalid. His hacking cough led to a collapse, and he was rushed to the hospital, but it was too late. Ironically he was playing the role of the hypochondriac in the play.
Thomas More (1516), author of Utopia, was imprisoned and executed for treason. His final words to his executioner: “Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short, take heed therefore thou strike not awry for saving thine honesty.”
Ben Jonson is the only person to be buried sitting in an upright position in Westmister Abbey. He asked his benefactor, Charles I of England, to give him only a square foot in the hallowed cemetery.
Famous Last Words:
Johann Goethe: “Open the second shutter so that more light may come in.”
O. Henry: “Don’t turn down the light. I’m afraid to go home in the dark.”
James Joyce: “Does nobody understand?”
Washington Irving: “I must arrange my pillows for another night. When will this end?”
Henry James: “So it has come at last—the Distin guished Thing.”
Benjamin Franklin composed his own epitaph:
The body of B. Franklin, printer,
Like the cover of an old book,
Its contents torn out,
And stript of its lettering and gilding
Lies here, food for worms.
But the work itself shall not be lost;
For it will, as he believed, appear once more
In a new and more elegant edition,
Corrected and amended
By its author.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Besides all the great novels, poems, and tales referred to in this work, these are the main works that supplied me with facts and anecdotes, and contributed to my thinking:
Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes. Edited by Clifton Fadiman and Andre Bernard (New York: Little, Brown, revised 2000).
Bloom, Clive. Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Boon, Marcus. The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
Burt, Daniel S. The Literary 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time (New York: Checkmark Books, 2001).
Cox, John D. The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Demers, Patricia. From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children’s Literature to 1850
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Eisner, Eric. Nineteenth Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Gilbar, Steven. Bibliotopia, or, Mr. Gilbar’s Book of Books & Catch-all of Literary Facts and Curiosities (Boston: David R Godine, 2005).
Glass, Loren Daniel. Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York: NYU Press, 2004).
Jackson, Mary V. Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
Joshi, S. T. Junk Fiction: America’s Obsessions with Bestsellers (Rockville, MD: Borgo Press, 2009).
Katsoulis, Melissa. Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous Frauds (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009).
Kiernan, Pauline. Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns (London: Quercus Publishing, 2006).
Lerer, Seth. Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Lutz, Deborah. The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seductive Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).
McDayter, Ghislaine. Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).