The Best American Mystery Stories of the Nineteenth Century

by Penzler, Otto

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  WASHINGTON IRVING The Story of the Young Robber

  WILLIAM LEGGETT The Rifle

  NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe

  EDGAR ALLAN POE The Murders in the Rue Morgue

  EDGAR ALLAN POE The Purloined Letter

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder

  DANIEL WEBSTER The Fatal Secret

  THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH The Danseuse

  LOUISA MAY ALCOTT A Double Tragedy: An Actor’s Story

  ALLAN PINKERTON The Two Sisters; Or, The Avenger

  FRANK STOCKTON The Lady, or the Tiger? and The Discourager of Hesitancy

  MARK TWAIN A Thumb-Print and What Came of It

  AMBROSE BIERCE My Favorite Murder

  CHARLES W. CHESNUTT The Sheriff’s Children

  RICHARD HARDING DAVIS Gallegher

  WILLIAM NORR ’Round the Opium Lamp

  PERCIVAL POLLARD Lingo Dan

  RODRIGUES OTTOLENGUI The Nameless Man and The Montezuma Emerald

  ANNA KATHARINE GREEN The Doctor, His Wife, and the Clock

  WILLIAM M. HINKLEY A Very Strange Case

  MARY E. WILKINS The Long Arm

  CLEVELAND MOFFETT The Mysterious Card and The Mysterious Card Unveiled

  MARK TWAIN Tom Sawyer, Detective

  MELVILLE DAVISSON POST The Corpus Delicti

  L. FRANK BAUM The Suicide of Kiaros

  ROBERT W. CHAMBERS The Purple Emperor

  EDWARD BELLAMY At Pinney’s Ranch

  STEPHEN CRANE The Blue Hotel

  EDITH WHARTON A Cup of Cold Water

  NICHOLAS CARTER The Detective’s Pretty Neighbor

  ELLEN GLASGOW A Point in Morals

  JACK LONDON A Thousand Deaths

  About the Editor

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction and compilation copyright © 2014 by Otto Penzler

  All rights reserved

  The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-30222-8

  eISBN 978-0-544-30231-0

  v1.0914

  FOR NELSON DEMILLE

  A wonderful writer and dear friend, with thanks for helping to change my life—for the better!

  Introduction

  MYSTERY FICTION has been the most successful literary genre in the English-speaking world for a century and a half, and when examining its significant elements, there should be no surprise in understanding why that is true.

  Virtually all mystery fiction dramatizes one of the simplest and purest components of human existence and behavior: the battle between the forces of Good and those of Evil. God versus Satan. The killer versus the savior. The detective versus the criminal. Since the majority of civilized society prefers good to evil, a great pleasure, or at least comfort, may be found in the mystery story, in which it is prevalent for righteousness to emerge triumphant.

  There is a theory—one that carries some validity—that detective fiction became popular late in the nineteenth century, coinciding with a decline in unwavering adherence to religion, wherein the sense of guilt that is ingrained in all of us had been somewhat relieved through the agency of some divine or apotheosized being. When religion loosened its hold upon our hearts, another outlet for our guilt had to be invented, and this occurred in the creation of mystery fiction.

  It often has been noted that the detective novel has as strict a composition as a sonnet (which may be a trifle exaggerated, but you get the idea), yet it is even more true that it is as formalized as a religious ritual. There is a necessary sin (in most mystery novels and stories, this takes the form of murder), a victim, of course, a high priest (the criminal) who must be destroyed by a higher power—the detective. Having inevitably identified to some degree with the light and dark sides of his own nature, the detective and the criminal, the reader seeks absolution and redemption. Thus the denouement of the mystery will be analogous to the Day of Judgment, when all is made clear and the soul is cleansed—and the criminal, through the omnipotent power of the detective, is caught and punished.

  It is important to understand what a mystery story is. It is common for most readers and people connected to the literary world to assume that mystery stories are detective stories. Some are, but there are many other subgenres, too. Fiction told from the point of view of a criminal, whether a bank robber or a gentleman jewel thief, falls into the mystery category, though the detectives tend be less significant characters. The thriller, in which the fate of the world or nation or another significant entity is at risk, also falls into the mystery category. Just because a murderer (or group of murderers) wants to kill a large number of people rather than have a single target does not make him less of a murderer, just as the detective—again, whether an individual or a group of people attempting to thwart a nefarious scheme, such as a police department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation—is no less defined as the heroic protagonist merely because he is hunting numerous villains rather than just one.

  The definition of the mystery that I have used for many years and that serves well is that it is any work of fiction in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the theme or the plot. Thus such books as Crime and Punishment and To Kill a Mockingbird should be regarded as mysteries, because lacking the underlying crimes, there can be no book. On the other hand, The Great Gatsby and The House of the Seven Gables, in which murder and other crimes occur, do not qualify, as those crimes are not the essential elements of the narratives; the books could still exist without the violence.

  The evolution of the mystery is long and complicated. Because it has become such a successful genre, both critically and commercially, it naturally has many fathers. Arguments have been made for innumerable works as being the first mystery novel or the first mystery short story. The murder of Abel by his brother Cain in the Old Testament has a legitimate claim to being the first crime story, but it is not, of course, a mystery, as the culprit was immediately known. There were, you see, so few possible suspects. Other stories of crime without detection abound in literature, notably in Tales of the Arabian Nights (under its many different titles) and in the dramas of William Shakespeare, such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth, just as there are some excellent examples of detection without crime, as in Voltaire’s Zadig, in which the eponymous hero, in the episode titled “The Dog and the Horse,” has made studies of nature that have enabled him to discern “a thousand differences where other men see nothing but uniformity.” As a result, he makes deductions so precisely that he is able to describe the queen’s missing spaniel and a runaway horse with incredible accuracy, though he has never seen either. He is suspected of sorcery, but his method of scientific reason makes the exercise seem elementary, as Sherlock Holmes would say.

  I observed the marks of a horse’s shoes, all at equal distance. This must be a horse, said I to myself, that gallops excellently. The dust on the trees on a narrow road that was but seven feet wide was a little brushed off, at the distance of three feet and a half from the middle of the road. This horse, said I, ha
s a tail three feet and a half long, which, being whisked to the right and left, has swept away the dust. I observed under the trees that form an arbor five feet in height, that the leaves from the branches were newly fallen, from whence I inferred that the horse had touched them, and that he must therefore be five feet high. As to his bit, it must be of gold of twenty-three carats, for he had rubbed its bosses against a stone which I knew to be a touchstone, and which I have tried. In a word, from a mark made by his shoes on flints of another kind, I concluded that he was shod with silver eleven deniers fine.

  While one would be prepared to state that this is a somewhat implausible sequence of deductions, it is nonetheless not unfair to describe Zadig as the first systematic detective in literature.

  Once the case has been made for murder stories without detection and for detection without crime, it becomes necessary to identify the first true detective in mystery fiction, and it can be none other than C. Auguste Dupin, who made his first appearance in 1841 in Edgar Allan Poe’s milestone of modern literature, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

  To state it simply and superfluously, there was very little likelihood of a detective appearing in fiction until there were such things in real life, and there were no detectives until the creation of the Bow Street Runners in London in 1749 by the author Henry Fielding (though it numbered only six members and was eventually superseded by Scotland Yard) and the Sûreté in Paris (1811), created by Eugène François Vidocq, who was, incredibly enough, a notorious criminal. These organizations formalized to some degree the apprehension of criminals and were responsible for turning them over to the courts for a trial and fairly measured-out punishment. While the administration of justice was not always as prevalent as the ideal, it was far superior to the previous system, which generally relied on state-sponsored torture during the interrogation process.

  When Poe created his detective, an amateur, he found it expedient to set the story in Paris. In this way, Dupin could show off his observational skills and deductive-reasoning genius as a counterpoint to the ineptitude of the official Parisian police. This established one of the tropes of the detective story. While many protagonists in detective fiction are members of an official police force, readers have long held a special place in their hearts for the romantic figure who is either a gifted amateur or a privately hired investigator. If he is a professional policeman in whatever agency he may be employed by, he is generally a maverick who prefers to work on his own and outside the rules that otherwise would restrict his behavior.

  In America, this figure, this lone protector of law and order, derives from the most romantic hero of the country’s history: the solitary gunfighter, sheriff, or U.S. marshal who singlehandedly helped defend honest citizens from the depredations of the outlaws in the West as the country expanded from its East Coast beginnings. Such names as Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, and Kit Carson still resonate, though many of their exploits and positive character traits were exaggerated by newspapers, which welcomed increased sales to Easterners titillated by the thrilling stories about these larger-than-life figures. To an even greater degree, the dime novels of the day made celebrities and legends out of the drunken Calamity Jane, the lecherous Hickok, the diminutive (five-foot-four) Carson, the card cheat Earp, and the William Cody who became famous for slaughtering 4,300 buffalo in eighteen months for no particular reason, earning him the nickname Buffalo Bill.

  Nevertheless, the legends had enough truth in them and were powerful enough to help form Americans’ notion of who they were as a nation. What was prized was the strength and values of the individual to protect the ordinary citizen. After the West was essentially tamed, readers looked for new heroes for whom to root, and they came along in detective fiction. They may not have been as swashbuckling as the lone gunman riding into town to clean it up, but they had their virtues. Instead of a six-shooter, they used their brains.

  Poe’s Dupin was the archetypical detective of the nineteenth century and remained so until the creation of the hard-boiled American private eye shortly after the end of World War I. Most American fiction until Poe’s invention had been some variations of folk tales and legends (by Washington Irving and his followers) and western adventures by James Fenimore Cooper, whose Leatherstocking saga became enormously popular. There were sea stories, romance stories, and attempts at the equivalent of gothic fiction, but it was a new country that didn’t have much time to write or read—and, with a still-developing educational system, many people couldn’t do either.

  Having created such a significant figure in his first detective story, then following it with two others about Dupin, Poe would have been expected to continue his unique, pioneering series, but he did not—nor did anyone else. There was general apathy to this new literary genre, and few writers decided to follow in his footsteps in America. It took twenty-five years after the publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” for a detective novel to be written, the now completely forgotten The Dead Letter (1866), by Seeley Regester (the pseudonym of Metta Victoria Fuller Victor).

  England was a different story, and the idea of detective fiction took hold fairly quickly when Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House (1852–1853), thus creating the first significant police detective in literature with Inspector Bucket. Most of Dickens’s ensuing novels involved crime and mystery, culminating with The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), regrettably left unfinished when he died after six chapters (of a planned twenty) were published. His friend and sometime collaborator, Wilkie Collins, entered the field as well, producing such masterpieces as The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), described by T. S. Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best” detective novel ever written. The fact that he was wrong on all three counts does not diminish Collins’s achievement in any way.

  Although pure tales of ratiocination (the word made up by Poe to describe the rational deductions derived from the detective’s keen observations) were not part of the American literary scene before or immediately after Poe’s groundbreaking work, other types of crime stories enjoyed success, though some of them stretch the definition of mystery that pertains to the genre as defined above. Tales posing such mysteries as “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” and “What do women want?” need not concern us here. The detective cerebral enough to answer these questions has yet to be created, and they are beyond the scope of this collection.

  Riddle stories are the foundation of the detective story and have existed since the first narratives were created to entertain the reader. In a riddle story, the reader is presented with a series of baffling situations and is challenged to arrive at a rational explanation for these unusual circumstances. The author reserves the solution to these confusing occurrences until the conclusion of the tale. While this may sound like a detective story, authors in the pre-Poe era largely resorted to explanations other than those employed in what may be regarded as the modern mystery. Supernatural entities like ghosts may make a sudden appearance to explain a mystery, or a character’s alter ego or subconscious may provide a solution. Coincidence may play a major role, or, to the discredit of all writers who did it, a character may wake from a dream to find that we were not connected to reality in the first place. While stories of this nature may often have some value, they are unsatisfying to a more discerning readership. The invention of the detective was needed to bring order to the chaos of the amorphous riddle story (although there are exceptions, such as the highly accomplished examples in this collection).

  Since it has been made clear that the detective story began with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” it may seem eccentric to begin this chronological compilation with several stories that preceded Poe. However, as defined earlier, the mystery genre includes a great deal of fiction that is neither about detectives nor is restricted to tales of ratiocination.

  Washington Irving’s brutal little crime story, truly as horrific today as when it was composed nearly two centuries ago, requires no detec
tive to inform us of what happened, or why, or by whom. Indeed, it might be said that it is precisely this kind of story, and the kind of crime it illustrates, that required the creation of detectives, both in real life and in fiction, to bring the villainous perpetrators to justice.

  The almost unknown and rarely reprinted (in spite of its historical significance and readability) William Leggett story, “The Rifle,” is the greatest leap forward in the evolution of the detective story. It is an excellent suspense story that displays a very early use of an element frequently employed in modern mystery stories: the accusation, capture, and imminent punishment of an innocent man for a murder he did not commit. The sophisticated storytelling technique of providing evidence of the protagonist’s innocence to the reader while concealing it from the other characters in the story became the mainstay of many of Alfred Hitchcock’s motion pictures as well as numerous suspense novels, notably the classic Phantom Lady, written by Cornell Woolrich under the pseudonym William Irish.

  Also groundbreaking in “The Rifle” is the amount of pure detective work described and the significance tied to the forensics of ballistics. This may seem rather straightforward and simplistic in a century intimately familiar with the techniques of modern police laboratories and the geniuses of CSI, but if we look back at the analysis today, it was dazzling for its time—the early years of an America that had just begun to inch westward from the Atlantic coast.

  Many of the stories in this comprehensive collection succeed as literature while failing the test of purity in the realm of detective fiction. Crime stories are strongly represented here, as are riddle stories, and several romans à clef that purport to be true crime journalism but are in fact honed to present their central figure in a brighter light than their actual activities might have warranted.