Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s

by Leslie S. Klinger

  Why did Van Dine succeed—at least, while he succeeded? Certainly no one could like Philo Vance. Ogden Nash famously quipped, “Philo Vance/Needs a kick in the pance,” and Van Dine appreciated the joke, incorporating it into a footnote in a later novel. An effete white upper-class snob, living in a Manhattan that seemed devoid of life above 120th Street, Vance moved among the rich and famous, a set well-known to Willard Wright. Undoubtedly Van Dine’s skill as a writer, his ability to bring a finely-honed purpose and polished literacy to the genre, played a significant part. Another factor was that despite the fantasy that was Vance’s life, there was verisimilitude and a certain realism: The first two novels were based on actual unsolved murders that had stunned and fascinated New Yorkers.18 Perhaps the American public yearned for an urban experience more familiar than Biggers’s Hawaii/California milieu or the undistinguished locales of many of Rinehart’s books. Certainly New York featured prominently in all of Van Dine’s books and was central to many of the Ellery Queen mysteries as well. Perhaps the public reveled in tales of the upper classes. Until Black Tuesday in 1929, princes of Wall Street and the effervescence of the stock markets, which touched rich and poor alike, entranced the American public. John Loughery observes, “Philo Vance makes no apologies for his privileged lifestyle. In the Jazz Age none was needed, as Willard had rightly concluded. A man who knew how to spend his money, a know-it-all with style, had automatic appeal.”19

  Dashiell Hammett was at a loss to understand Van Dine’s success. He wrote a scathing review of The Benson Murder Case in the Saturday Review of Literature for January 15, 1927: “. . . The murderer’s identity becomes obvious quite early in the story. The authorities, no matter how stupid the author chose to make them, would have cleared up the mystery promptly if they had been allowed to follow the most rudimentary police routine. But then what would there have been for the gifted Vance to do? This Philo Vance is in the Sherlock Holmes tradition and his conversational manner is that of a high-school girl who has been studying the foreign words and phrases in the back of her dictionary. He is a bore when he discusses art and philosophy, but when he switches to criminal psychology he is delightful. There is a theory that any one who talks enough on any subject must, if only by chance, finally say something not altogether incorrect. Vance disproves this theory: he manages always, and usually ridiculously, to be wrong. . . .”

  Hammett’s own time would come in only a few years, but for the time being, in the late 1920s and through the mid-1930s, the European style of puzzle-mystery dominated American crime fiction, and Willard Huntington Wright was the golden child of publishing and the king of American crime writers. Howard Haycraft credited Van Dine with bringing the American detective story to “a new peak of excellence and popularity,” but observed that he did so by doing nothing more than mimic the well-established English tradition.20 In the end, the pretentiousness and lack of humor of the novels would outweigh readers’ initial fascination. Vance’s erudition became displayed more and more in large and often gratuitous segments that slowed down the tales, and the snob appeal wore thin. By 1939, when Wright died, both he and Vance had worn out their welcome, and except for the long-lived Ellery Queen mysteries, Van Dine–style stories had been largely replaced by the “hard-boiled” realism of Hammett and others.

  Frederic Dannay in 1943

  Manfred B. Lee, ca. 1965

  The success of the Philo Vance mysteries also inspired two Brooklyn-based cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905–1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905–1971),21 to write an obsessively detailed, highly logical puzzle-mystery and submit it to a magazine contest in 1929. They won the contest, but the organizer went out of business. Fortunately for the cousins, a book publisher stepped in, and The Roman Hat Mystery was published, launching the extremely long career of the duo known as “Ellery Queen.” Thirty-two novels featuring the detective Ellery Queen followed, the last published in 1971. In addition, the cousins wrote dozens of Ellery Queen short stories, four novels under the name Barnaby Ross, and several “stand-alone” novels, while Dannay edited the highly influential Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (which continues today), a number of anthologies of other writers’ work, and several critical and bibliographic works, including the monumental Queen’s Quorum: A History of the Detective-Crime Short Story as Revealed by the 100 Most Important Books Published in This Field Since 1845 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951). The Ellery Queen novels took the clue-based mystery to its logical end, making each book a game—complete with a pause in the narrative labeled “Challenge to the Readers”—to be won by the truly astute reader or pleasurably “lost” by the reader who failed to out-deduce the detective.

  There is no mistaking the initial influence of S. S. Van Dine’s writing on the cousins. In his early years, the character of Ellery Queen was, in the words of the editors of the Detectionary, “a supercilious aristocrat who condescendingly assisted his long-suffering father, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York Police Department. Young Ellery was a sartorial cliché, dressed in tweeds, wearing pince-nez, and carrying a walking stick.”22 This version of the detective quoted liberally from a wide range of literary sources and affected a bibliophilia that, while not as obnoxious as Vance’s art expertise, could often be annoying, when, for example, he laments a rare book sacrificed to use as notepaper or the lost opportunity to acquire a scarce first edition.

  Yet Ellery Queen achieved remarkable longevity, while Van Dine did not; and in the long run, Queen’s books achieved greater popularity.23 Howard Haycraft observed that “the authors modestly speak of the ‘absolutely logical’ fair-play method of deduction, which, indeed, has been the sign-mark of their work from the beginning. But there is more than this. Although the Messrs. ‘Queen’ frankly and necessarily regard their output as a means of livelihood, they have brought to the detective story a respect and integrity which—combined with their unflagging zest—accounts largely for the high level they have consistently maintained. . . . For the great part, the Queen tales are as adroit a blending of the intellectual and dramatic aspects of the genre, of meticulous plot-work, lively narration, easy, unforced humor, and entertaining personae, as can be found in the modern detective novel.” Haycraft also credits Queen with mating the realism of the “Hammett school” with the puzzle-clue mystery: they were less pretentious than Van Dine’s books but agreeably livelier, less impactful than Hammett’s but also less mannered.24

  Cover of Crackajack Funnies, No. 25 (1940), one of the twenty issues of the series

  Van Dover points to other differences that he argues led to Queen’s long-term success and Van Dine’s ultimate failure. Aestheticism was intrinsic to Vance’s character and ultimately off-putting. Ellery’s intelligence is not a matter of zealotry but rather ornamental, a matter of pride to his father. Despite his cardboard companion Van Dine, Vance is alone; in contrast, Ellery is part of a warm and affectionate household. More fundamentally, Vance is consistently unpleasant, while Ellery is quite simply likeable—in Van Dover’s words, “a nice fellow.”25 Finally, Vance was like a fly in amber—unable to adapt or change as American readers’ tastes evolved. Queen, on the other hand, evolved over time, reflecting the decades in which he worked. So long as the American readership craved puzzle-stories, Ellery Queen would have an appreciative audience.

  But the decade of the 1920s was not exclusively the purview of the New York–based puzzle-mystery nor even detective-based crime fiction. It was also the era that spawned the American “crime novel.” Rather than focus on the process of capture of the criminal or the work of a criminal investigator such as the Continental Op, these works explored the criminal—his or her background and emotional state before the crime, the circumstances of the commission of the crime, and the impact of the crime on the criminal. Early examples of such works are, of course, the Newgate Calendar in England and the execution-sermons of America, but more literary efforts appeared in diluted versions like M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Marie Belloc Lowndes
’s The Lodger (1913), the latter a thinly veiled exploration of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. Later American versions included such outstanding novels as James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1943), Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947), and Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952). But in the 1920s, W. R. Burnett pioneered the sub-genre with his brilliant Little Caesar.

  William Riley Burnett (1899–1982) was born and raised in Springfield, Ohio. He developed literary ambitions early, and when he moved to Chicago, in 1927, he already had produced five novels, several plays, and a hundred short stories, none of which had been published. All of that changed with the publication of Little Caesar, in 1929. Burnett went on to write and publish thirty-six more novels, including the highly regarded High Sierra (1941) and The Asphalt Jungle (1949). Equally importantly, he wrote the screenplay for the 1931 film of Little Caesar, setting the bar for dozens of gangster films to follow and launching the career of Edward G. Robinson. Burnett wrote, co-wrote, or contributed to dozens of other film and television scripts, including such classics as Scarface (1932), High Sierra (1941), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950), adapting many of his own stories as well as others (for example, This Gun for Hire [1942] was an adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1936 novel).

  In 1957, Burnett wrote an introduction to a new edition of Little Caesar, in which he recalled the struggle of adjusting to life in the big city and the inspiration that found him when he met a local gangster. He had set out to write the story of the rise and fall of a criminal without psychology or description; he determined to make it wholly in dialogue, in the jargon of the Italian mob. It was an instant success, selected by the Literary Guild for the month of June 1929, assuring substantial sales. The Chicago Daily Tribune called it “a remarkable first book. . . . The people [Burnett] creates are so real that you see them long after you finish the story.”26 “Here, certainly, is a best-seller,” wrote the Hartford Daily Courant.27 The New York Times said, “This is an unusually good story about Chicago gangsters. . . . The sentences are as hard and abrupt as the bullet shots that clear the way for Rico’s rise to gang dominance and his downfall.”28

  W. R. Burnett with Edward G. Robinson on the set of Little Caesar (ca. 1931)

  Not only was the subject of Little Caesar timely, as Al Capone and Big Bill Thompson ruled Chicago; Burnett was able to adapt a true story about the Sam Cardinelli gang that he found in a newly published work of sociology, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago, by Frederick N. Thrasher.29 By using these bases, Burnett followed in the tradition of earlier American crime writers. Josiah Flynt and Alfred Hodder were reporters whose “Notes from the Underworld” appeared in McClure’s in 1901. In 1902, Flynt followed up with a series of more factual pieces called “The World of Graft.” Lincoln Steffens’s Shame of the Cities was published in 1904, collecting a series of articles about American political corruption; Hutchens Hapgood’s The Autobiography of a Thief appeared in 1905, and Melville Davisson Post (of Uncle Abner fame) wrote a six-part series of tales of “Extraordinary Cases” for The Saturday Evening Post in 1911. James Boyle wrote Boston Blackie in 1919, stories about a professional crook in the underworld of San Francisco, described by LeRoy Lad Panek as “drip[ping] with sentiment and sentimentality.”30

  A mug shot of Alphonse Capone in 1931

  Yet Burnett’s writing achieved a viewpoint that the earlier writers did not. Although the earlier purveyors of crime writing expressed their compassion and interest, they could not help distancing themselves from their subjects, moralizing or sympathizing as appropriate but not inhabiting the criminals. Burnett was the first to do so. Little Caesar is an unflinching portrait of men and women as they were, told in their own language and devoid of sentimentality. Although Burnett likened Rico to Julius Caesar, the world does not shake at his downfall. Little Caesar has all the trappings of a classical tragedy: Rico’s strengths are also his weaknesses, the acts of daring that propel him to the top are also his downfall. But, as Panek observes, “Little Caesar isn’t a tragedy because that’s the way things are in the twentieth century.”31

  1 Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  2 The story first appeared in the anthology Stories and Sketches by Our Best Authors (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1867).

  3 The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Detective Stories, edited and introduced by Michael Sims (New York: Walker & Company, 2012), p. xxvii.

  4 Post also contributed the stories of Randolph Mason, a brilliant but corrupt lawyer, much admired by Willard Wright—see the title page of The Benson Murder Case, at page 252.

  5 Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity. ([2nd ed.] Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 82.

  6 Though not Rinehart’s first novel, it was her first published work.

  7 Nurse Hilda Adams, “Miss Pinkerton,” appeared in five of Rinehart’s lesser-known novels, the first two in 1914 and the remaining in 1932, 1942, and 1950, respectively; and Letitia or “Tish” Carberry starred in a long-running series of Rinehart’s stories in The Saturday Evening Post, collected into six anthologies between 1911 and 1937.

  8 Indeed, among the 100 novels that were listed by Publishers Weekly as the ten bestselling books for each of the years 1920–29, only five were crime fiction: English writer E. Phillips Oppenheim’s The Great Impersonation in 1920, two Mary Roberts Rinehart novels, and, in 1928 and 1929, S. S. Van Dine’s second and third novels, discussed below. J. K. Van Dover, in Making the Detective Story American: Biggers, Van Dine and Hammett and the Turning Point of the Genre, 1925–1930 (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010) [hereinafter “Van Dover”], tabulated “bestsellers” through various criteria for the period 1920–29. Only Rinehart’s The Red Lamp and Lost Ecstasy, Biggers’s The Chinese Parrot, Behind That Curtain, and The Black Camel, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Van Dine’s Canary Murder Case, Green Murder Case, and Bishop Murder Case, and Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest made Van Dover’s compilation. Though critics have praised the English and damned the American writers of the period, few achieved any real commercial success in America. Contrast that with Publishers Weekly’s list of the top ten bestselling titles of 2016, of which four were crime fiction.

  9 Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (London: Peter Davies, 1942) [hereinafter “Murder for Pleasure”], p. 163.

  10 Letter to Laurance Chambers, December 18, 1922, Lilly Library (Indiana University).

  11 Harvard College Class of 1907 Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report, p. 43 (reported in Charlie Chan, by Yunte Huang [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010], p. 109).

  12 See Charles P. Mitchell’s definitive A Guide to Charlie Chan Films (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1999) for a list of the fifty-three films and a discussion of Chan on television and radio. See also Appendix, p. 250, for a discussion of the 1926 film of The House Without a Key.

  13 Murder for Pleasure, pp. 178–79.

  14 Van Dover, p. 7.

  15 Wright also edited The Great Detective Stories: A Chronological Anthology (New York: Scribner’s, 1927) and provided an extensive and learned introduction.

  16 At the height of his fame in 1928, Van Dine wrote an article, “I Used to Be a Highbrow and Look at Me Now,” for The American Magazine 106 (September 1928), 14 ff., and reprinted in Howard Haycraft’s The Art of the Mystery Story, in which he made clear both his pride and his regret at his achievements.

  17 See Appendix to The Benson Murder Case, p. 497. The “rules” were first published in 1928, after the success of the first three books.

  18 See The Benson Murder Case, Author’s Note, p. 304, for a discussion of the Joseph Elwell case. The Canary Murder Case was based loosely on the killing, in 1923, of Dorothy “Dot” King, the “Broadway Bu
tterfly.” See John Loughery’s definitive Alias S. S. Van Dine: The Man Who Created Philo Vance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), p. 175.

  19 Loughery, p. 188.

  20 Murder for Pleasure, p. 169.

  21 The two cousins were children of Jewish immigrants; Daniel Nathan adopted the name Frederic Dannay, and Emanuel Lepofsky used the professional name Manfred Bennington Lee. In a stroke of marketing genius, they named the author and detective Ellery Queen. For a discussion of the choice of the name, see the essential Royal Bloodline: Ellery Queen, Author and Detective, by Francis M. Nevins Jr. (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1974), pp. 4–5.

  22 Detectionary: A Biographical Dictionary of the Leading Characters in Detective and Mystery Fiction. Compiled by Chris Steinbrunner, Charles Shibuk, Otto Penzler, Marvin Lachman, and Francis M. Nevins Jr. (Lock Haven, PA: Hammermill Paper Company, 1972), pp. 193–94.

  23 Between 1930 and 1935, when only one of Van Dine’s books made Van Dover’s compilation of mystery and detection bestsellers (see note 8, above), five of Queen’s books are listed. Frank Luther Mott, in Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Bowker, 1947), examined books against a measuring rod of 1 percent of the decade’s population. Three of Queen’s works measured up between 1926 and 1935; none of Van Dine’s did.

  24 Murder for Pleasure, pp. 174–76.

  25 Van Dover, p. 58.

  26 June 22, 1929, p. 11.

  27 June 15, 1929, p. 8E.

  28 June 2, 1929, p. 24.

  29 See Little Caesar, notes 71 and 72.

  30 Probable Cause, p. 117.

  31 Ibid., p. 138.

  A Note on the Texts