There are myriad other ways in which Victor’s structural arc stands in stark contrast to Poe’s. Victor’s novels were not driven to immediate climax, but filled with reversals, twists, and misdirections that both prolonged the denouement and arguably made the climax that much more rewarding. Victor didn’t just set out the facts of the crime: she explored social mores, distinguishing between the upper and middle classes with a subtle reference to clothing or manner. She described atmosphere and scenery in careful detail, giving her stories an air of grounded reality. The characters in Victor’s books were not cynical about crime. They felt loss and tragedy to their very core. For these reasons and more, it seems that the Victor formula, not Poe’s, is the convention to which modern crime fiction more closely hews.
Why, then, is Victor lost to obscurity?
The world of fiction—especially crime fiction—has a tendency to ignore the contributions of women, no matter how popular they become. In fact, popularity has often delegitimized the work of many women writers. Let’s not forget that Daphne du Maurier, arguably one of the finest suspense writers of all time, was chided by many critics of her day for being “lightweight.” Patricia Highsmith, who exiled herself to France, was excoriated by the American literati for her psychologically dark crimes and ambiguously drawn characters. That both women had their work adapted into hugely successful films ensured their longevity. They are now being rediscovered by a generation of scholars; however, to a certain extent, this disparity between commercial and critical success is an ongoing issue. Today, one seldom reads the phrase “transcending the genre” when a reviewer is describing a crime novel written by a woman. It seems as if it is more acceptable for women to write feisty tales of independent gals than it is for them to write serious crime fiction.
That the name Seeley Regester and not Metta Fuller Victor appears on the original cover of The Dead Letter is not an anomaly. Neither is the fact that the price—fifty cents—marked the tome as several steps above a typical dime novel. Throughout history, women have published their work under pseudonyms in hopes of finding a larger, more legitimate readership. Having a gender-neutral or male-identified name was, and to some degree still is, considered a positive marketing position. There was a reason Louisa May Alcott chose to publish her thrillers under the anonymous authorship of “the Children’s Friend.” Surely, Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot), Isak Dinesen (Karen von Blixen), and Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë) were precursors to J. K. Rowling, P. D. James, and J. A. Jance.
And with good reason.
A quick perusal of any of the major book review sections shows a staggering disparity between the number of featured books by female versus male authors, not to mention the paucity of women included on the short lists of major literary prizes. Drill it down to just crime fiction authors, and the chasm becomes wider. Even the editors of this collection had a hard time finding authors (both male and female) to talk about female writers. This is not due to willful ignorance on the part of the fine writers who are included here, but because a great deal of our literary history has either been suppressed or lost.
This issue has never been so glaringly illustrated as by Victor. Many early popular works by women have disappeared, or have been dismissed as their era’s equivalent of “chick lit,” but it’s shocking to find that the person who created an entire genre has effectively been erased from our consciousness.
One of the problems with bringing this omission to light is that taking a stand for women is often seen as being anti-men. It’s a useful device for dismissing an uncomfortable problem, but, of all readers, crime fiction readers—readers who seek out books that discuss the injustices in society—should be able to see beyond this specious charge. It’s also worth pointing out that the majority of book buyers, some 80 to 85 percent, are women, so to place the problem squarely at the feet of men is not only lazy but wrong. (And it should probably be added that Anna Katharine Green, who shaped the future of serialized crime fiction, was a staunch opponent of both the feminist movement and women’s suffrage.) In this matter, as in many others, women have proven to be our own worst enemy.
It is an indisputable fact that those who love the crime genre have long been invested in celebrating the early masters, from Poe to Chandler to Boucher, and beyond. I submit that we should be actively promoting all of the predecessors on whose shoulders we stand—not just Victor, but Shirley Jackson, Miriam Allen deFord, Helen MacInnes, and countless others. We owe it to ourselves to truly understand the roots of the genre that has given so many of us not just hours of reading pleasure, but a community, a sense of belonging, and a vocation.
Both women and men have long toiled in this oft-ghettoized genre to craft believable stories with well-drawn, compelling characters. Poe’s formula called for a masterful detective whose intelligence and cold eye were the only tools needed to catch the killer. Victor believed that exploring the world of the criminal—his or her family, neighbors, and relationships—was the best route to solving the crime. She combined social commentary with good old-fashioned murder. Women are not the only authors who have picked up the mantle of Victor’s original narrative structure. While writers such as Mo Hayder, Denise Mina, and Gillian Flynn continue to excel at exploring the psychological aspects of crime, one might posit that the starkly rendered atmosphere, the multilayered relationships, and the strong female characters found in the works of Michael Connelly, Mark Billingham, and Lee Child share a kinship with the crime novels of Metta Fuller Victor.
Karin Slaughter is the author of several number one best sellers. A passionate supporter of libraries, Slaughter spearheaded the Save the Libraries campaign (www.savethelibraries.com) to help raise funds for ailing libraries. She has donated all income from her e-short story “Thorn in My Side” to both the American and British library systems. For her twelfth novel, Criminal, Slaughter exhaustively researched racial and gender politics in the Atlanta Police Department during the 1970s, resulting in a deeply personal exploration of her hometown and her country during a period of enormous social change. Visit her online at www.karinslaughter.com.
The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins (1868)
ANDREW TAYLOR
* * *
Wilkie Collins (1824–89) was a hugely prolific English writer, producing thirty novels in his lifetime in addition to plays, short stories, and essays, although he remains best known for his novels The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). T. S. Eliot described the latter as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe.” Collins was a huge celebrity author in his day, yet still managed to maintain two distinct long-term relationships simultaneously, dividing his time in London between Caroline Graves, whom he claimed was his wife (although they never married), and the younger Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children under the assumed name of William Dawson.
* * *
In the early hours of Saturday, June 30, 1860, somebody cut the throat of three-year-old Saville Kent. This was the start of the Road Hill House case. The tortuous and painful unraveling of this horrific real-life murder gripped the mind and terrified the imagination of Victorian Britain.
Some crimes have a deeper, darker resonance that stretches far beyond the horror of the act and its immediate consequences. Think of Jack the Ripper or the Lizzie Borden case; think of the Boston Strangler or the murder of James Bulger. Such cases are so shocking that they infiltrate our culture; often they trigger changes that ripple through society and wash up in unexpected places.
One of the ripples from Saville Kent’s murder led eventually to Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and to the unintended creation of a hugely influential variety of what we now call crime fiction.
As Kate Summerscale showed in The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (2008), her study of the Kent murder, the impact of the case derived from the fact that it was not a matter that could be safely pigeonholed as a crime concerning poor and morally inade
quate people living in remote urban slums on the margins of society. This, in terms of the great Victorian reading public, was about People Like Us. It was a middle-class affair set in a substantial country house: it was clear from the start that the little boy’s murderer must be one of the family or one of their servants. There was trouble in paradise, and paradise would never be quite the same again.
Wilkie Collins was a commercially astute author, and it’s not surprising that he should have decided to capitalize on elements of the Kent murder when he was casting around for the subject of a new novel in the late 1860s. He lived very much in the present, and his novels set out to reflect and comment on the rapidly changing world around him. At the time, he was riding a wave. The decade had begun with the enormous critical and financial success of The Woman in White (1860), perhaps his best novel. This was followed by No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866), a pair of flawed masterpieces that were almost equally lucrative.
The Moonstone was published in 1868. We know a good deal about how Collins planned the book: he set out, quite consciously, to undermine the sensation novel, a genre he had done much to invent, by creating a plot that provided rational solutions to a series of apparently bizarre events. His early books, he said, had set out “to trace the influence of circumstance on character.” With The Moonstone, it was the other way round.
The Moonstone does not revolve around a murder but, in other respects, the parallels with the Road Hill House case are striking. At the heart of the novel is a country-house mystery with a limited circle of suspects. The story unfolds in a series of narratives supposedly written by different people—a technique that Collins had used very effectively in The Woman in White to orchestrate a complex plot and reveal the inner lives of a variety of characters. It is also, in essence, one of the basic techniques of both criminal investigation and the classical detective story: the investigator persuades each suspect to give his or her version of events; the investigator then sifts, sorts, and weighs the different accounts to arrive at the truth. In The Moonstone, as in perhaps most detective fiction, a sort of meta-investigation takes place alongside the fictional one, for the reader becomes the detective as well.
Another similarity between the novel and the Road Hill House case is the police response. In real life, the baffled local police called in Inspector Whicher of the newly created detective force at Scotland Yard. Collins mimics this, creating his own Whicher in the shape of Sergeant Cuff.
The dramatic tension of the Saville Kent investigation obsessed contemporary observers and later cast a long, sometimes baleful shadow over British crime fiction. The investigating officer, whom the law empowered to search the most private places and interrogate suspects regardless of their status, was not a gentleman; by definition, a police detective belonged to the lower orders. In Britain’s class-ridden society, the detective’s freedom to pry into the lives of his social superiors was profoundly disturbing. Yet the real Whicher and the fictional Cuff had reputations as investigators that impressed even their critics. Their methods fascinated the public, and so did the challenge of the puzzle and the thrill of the chase. In the words of Wilkie Collins himself, Victorian Britain had caught “the detective fever.”
In the novel, the mystery revolves not around murder but around the theft of a great diamond, known as the Moonstone because it is said to wax and wane with the moon. Rachel Verinder inherits the diamond from her wicked uncle, who had looted it from an Indian temple. On the night of her eighteenth birthday it is stolen. Suspicion falls on the inmates of the house, including the servants. It also falls on some visitors, a party of Indian jugglers.
It’s interesting that the novel treats the Indians very sympathetically—and this at the high noon of the British Empire, only a few years after the bloody suppression of the Indian Mutiny. But Wilkie Collins was always a subversive author whose work attacked the hypocrisy and injustice sometimes practiced by his own readers. He instinctively defended the vulnerable of Victorian society: people from other races than his own, the poor, servants, and women. (It has to be admitted that Collins himself was not entirely consistent where women were concerned. He never married, but for many years maintained two mistresses and their families in separate London homes.)
The local police are called to investigate the theft of the diamond, but they prove ineffectual. Scotland Yard arrives in the person of Sergeant Cuff, a man of experience and dogged sagacity with a taste for growing roses. (He is also, according to Peter Ackroyd, the first detective to use a magnifying glass as an essential part of his professional equipment.) Cuff is certainly no cipher, but an amateur, Rachel’s cousin Franklin Blake, pursues a parallel investigation to that of the police. Collins lays down the template for the dual investigation, professional and amateur, that characterizes so much crime fiction.
Fear and uncertainty permeate the novel like a fog. Collins creates an illusion of solidity and historicity with the logical processes of the investigation, and with the multinarrative technique. But in truth, the story line doesn’t have a great deal to do with gritty realism. The opiated visions of laudanum color The Moonstone in more ways than one. Not only does the drug figure significantly in the plot, but Collins was dosing himself with ever-increasing quantities in a largely vain attempt to deal with ill-defined pains that frequently racked his body from early middle age. His work resembles Poe’s in its precarious balance between the rational and the logical on the one hand, and the terrors of the unconscious mind on the other.
The result of this combustible set of ingredients is the book that T. S. Eliot famously called “the first and greatest of English detective novels.” We can quibble with both these rather sweeping judgments, but not with a great deal of conviction. Wilkie Collins effectively invented the format of the classic Golden Age detective story that was to dominate British crime fiction for so long. It’s hard to imagine how Conan Doyle could have created Sherlock Holmes without the example of Edgar Allan Poe’s Chevalier Dupin stories. Similarly Christie, Sayers, and their colleagues wrote by the light of the sinister glow from The Moonstone.
But the novel is far more than a footnote in literary history. The Moonstone has never been out of print since it was published. Radical, challenging, and supremely entertaining, it is a book to read if you haven’t already. And if you have, give yourself the pleasure of reading it again.
Andrew Taylor’s novels include the best seller The American Boy, chosen by the Times as one of the top ten crime novels of the decade; the Roth Trilogy (filmed for TV as Fallen Angel); the Lydmouth Series; Bleeding Heart Square; and The Anatomy of Ghosts. He has most recently been awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger and Sweden’s Martin Beck Award. He has written another novel but can’t decide what to call it. He is the Spectator’s crime fiction reviewer. Visit him online at www.andrew-taylor.co.uk.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)
LINDA BARNES
* * *
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was one of the pivotal figures in mystery writing. A physician and writer born in Edinburgh, Scotland, he is best known as the creator of “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes and his faithful amanuensis, Dr. John Watson, although he also wrote a number of historical novels, and a series of adventure stories featuring the character of Professor Challenger, the best known of which remains The Lost World. He was friends for a time with the magician Harry Houdini, and became fascinated by Spiritualism in later life, a consequence of a series of bereavements that included the loss of his wife, Louisa, and his son Kingsley, leading Conan Doyle to seek proof of an existence beyond the grave.
* * *
The curtains were the color of midnight, their edges weighted with a white-ball fringe that gleamed in the darkness like the stars that studded the midwestern sky. The room measured ten feet by twelve feet, sheltering narrow twin beds, a tall wooden chest, and a mismatched bureau with drawers that creaked alarmingly. The windows, one at the head of m
y bed, one off to the side, were awkwardly placed and small, but provided a cross breeze on stiflingly hot summer nights. The bedspreads echoed the midnight curtains, and each lonely pillow was encased in a navy sham.
“Stop playing with the curtains and go to sleep!”
Would that I could. I counted the balls of yarn that edged the curtains: a habit, a ritual, a sort of pagan rosary. There were monsters in the closet, demons under the bed. Across the room, my sister slept peacefully, her face to the wall, her bed a safe haven. She had not read “The Speckled Band.”
The door slammed. The silence echoed. As I counted the yarn balls, I strained to hear the telltale noises: the click of the lock, the metallic clank, the slither and hiss of the snake.
Wait! Was that a low, clear whistle?
Vernon Baker, the next-door neighbor, kept dogs, haughty standard poodles. He could be outdoors summoning his pets, yet what if it were not the innocent neighbor but the mad doctor, Grimesby Roylott, the terror of Stoke Moran, whistling to recall the swamp adder, “the deadliest snake in India,” from its nightly predation? In the impenetrable darkness, my heart pounded like a jackhammer.
Books to Die For Page 4