Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s

by Leslie S. Klinger

“I say, Markham,” he drawled; “what a grotesque spectacle the trial was! The real evidence, y’ know, wasn’t even introduced. Benson was convicted entirely on suppositions, presumptions, implications and inf’rences. . . . God help the innocent Daniel who inadvertently falls into a den of legal lions!”

  Markham, to my surprise, nodded gravely.

  “Yes,” he concurred; “but if Sullivan had tried to get a conviction on your so-called psychological theories, he’d have been adjudged insane.”

  “Doubtless,” sighed Vance. “You illuminati of the law would have little to do if you went about your business intelligently.”

  “Theoretically,” replied Markham at length, “your theories are clear enough; but I’m afraid I’ve dealt too long with material facts to forsake them for psychology and art. . . . However,” he added lightly, “if my legal evidence should fail me in the future, may I call on you for assistance?”

  “I’m always at your service, old chap, don’t y’ know,” Vance rejoined. “I rather fancy, though, that it’s when your legal evidence is leading you irresistibly to your victim that you’ll need me most, what?”

  And the remark, though intended merely as a good-natured sally, proved strangely prophetic.

  154.Inopportune; the wrong choice.

  155.At the time, objections to admission of the jewels or the gun in evidence would have been viewed as frivolous. Of course, the trial would have gone quite differently today. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures (interpreted to mean searches without “probable cause,” and in most cases, a search warrant issued by a judge), did not apply to state and local law enforcement officials. The decision in Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U.S. 25 (1949), changed that: The U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment was part of the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause against infringement by state and local officials. In 1961, in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, the Supreme Court decreed that, in general, evidence obtained by means of an illegal search and seizure could not be used by the prosecution. Under today’s rules, then, the presence of the jewels and murder weapon in Benson’s apartment would be inadmissible evidence.

  156.J. K. Van Dover suggests that this echoes the fact that the ex-husband of the final female companion of Joseph Elwell (see p. 304, note *) married the “woman in black” who accompanied the companion (p. 107).

  APPENDIX

  S. S. Van Dine Sets Down Twenty Rules for Detective Stories157

  The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more—it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws—unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concoter of literary mysteries lives up to them. Herewith, then, is a sort of Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author’s inner conscience. To wit:

  1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.

  2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.

  3. There must be no love interest in the story. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.158

  4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It’s false pretenses.

  5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions—not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.

  6. The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.

  7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.159

  8. The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic sèances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.

  9. There must be but one detective—that is, but one protagonist of deduction—one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn’t know who his co-deductor is. It’s like making the reader run a race with a relay team.

  10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story—that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.

  11. Servants must not be chosen by the author as the culprit.160 This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person—one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.

  12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.

  13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. Here the author gets into adventure fiction and secret-service romance. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance, but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds in his jousting-bout with the police.

  14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.

  15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent—provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face—that all the clues really pointed to the culprit—and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.

  16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action, and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.

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sp; 17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by house-breakers and bandits are the province of the police department—not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.161

  18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to hoodwink a trusting and kind-hearted reader.

  19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction—in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader’s everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.

  20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective-story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author’s ineptitude and lack of originality. (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect.162 (b) The bogus spiritualistic sèance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away. (c) Forged finger-prints. (d) The dummy-figure alibi. (e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar.163 (f) The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person. (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops. (h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in. (i) The word-association test for guilt. (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unravelled by the sleuth.164

  157.The essay first appeared in the September 1928 issue of The American Magazine, pp. 129–31. Longer versions have appeared elsewhere.

  158.Compare this to Watson’s observation of Sherlock Holmes: “He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his” (“A Scandal in Bohemia”).

  159.Murder features infrequently in the Sherlock Holmes canon, but all four of the Holmes novels do include murders.

  160.The butler “did it” in one of the Holmes stories, “The Musgrave Ritual,” but that may be the first instance of the cliché in detective fiction.

  161.That is, Professor James Moriarty, the “Napoleon of Crime,” need not apply.

  162.Of course, Sherlock Holmes pioneered this forensic technique and wrote a monograph on tobacco ash.

  163.Van Dine here refers to the incident of the dog in the night-time central to the solution of the “Silver Blaze” mystery by Sherlock Holmes.

  164.Another knock on Holmes, who deciphers code in The Valley of Fear and “The Dancing Men” (and before Holmes, Poe featured a cipher in “The Gold-Bug”).

  Facsimile first-edition dust jacket for The Roman Hat Mystery.

  THE ROMAN

  HAT MYSTERY1

  A Problem in Deduction

  BY

  ELLERY QUEEN

  Grateful Acknowledgement is Made to

  Professor Alexander Goettler

  Chief Toxicologist of the City of New York

  For His Friendly Offices

  In the Preparation of This Tale

  1.First published in August 1929 in New York by Frederick A. Stokes.

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  LEXICON OF PERSONS CONNECTED WITH THE INVESTIGATION

  PART ONE

  I. In Which Are Introduced a Theatre-Audience and a Corpse

  II. In Which One Queen Works and Another Queen Watches

  III. In Which a “Parson” Comes to Grief

  IV. In Which Many Are Called and Two Are Chosen

  V. In Which Inspector Queen Conducts Some Legal Conversations

  VI. In which the District Attorney Turns Biographer

  VII. The Queens Take Stock

  PART TWO

  VIII. In Which the Queens Meet Mr. Field’s Very Best Friend

  IX. In Which the Mysterious Mr. Michaels Appears

  X. In Which Mr. Field’s Tophats Begin to Assume Proportions

  XI. In Which the Past Casts a Shadow

  XII. In Which the Queens Invade Society

  XIII. Queen to Queen

  PART THREE

  XIV. In Which the Hat Grows

  XV. In Which an Accusation is Made

  XVI. In Which the Queens Go to the Theatre

  XVII. In Which More Hats Grow

  XVIII. Stalemate

  INTERLUDE. In Which the Reader’s Attention is Respectfully Required

  PART FOUR

  XIX. In Which Inspector Queen Conducts More Legal Conversations

  XX. In Which Mr. Michaels Writes a Letter

  XXI. In Which Inspector Queen Makes a Capture

  XXII. —And Explains

  Foreword

  I have been asked by both publisher and author to write a cursory preface to the story of Monte Field’s murder.2 Let me say at once that I am neither a writer nor a criminologist. To make authoritative remarks, therefore, anent the techniques of crime and crime-fiction is obviously beyond my capacity. Nevertheless, I have one legitimate claim to the privilege of introducing this remarkable story, based as it is upon perhaps the most mystifying crime of the past decade . . . If it were not for me, “The Roman Hat Mystery” would never have reached the fiction-reading public. I am responsible for its having been brought to light; and there my pallid connection with it ends.

  During the past winter I shook off the dust of New York and went a-traveling in Europe. In the course of a capricious roving about the corners of the Continent (a roving induced by that boredom which comes to every Conrad3 in quest of his youth)—I found myself one August day in a tiny Italian mountain-village. How I got there, its location and its name do not matter; a promise is a promise, even when it is made by a stockbroker. Dimly I remembered that this toy hamlet perched on the lip of a sierra harbored two old friends whom I had not seen for two years. They had come from the seething sidewalks of New York to bask in the brilliant peace of an Italian countryside—well, perhaps it was as much curiosity about their regrets as anything else, that prompted me to intrude upon their solitude.

  My reception at the hands of old Richard Queen, keener and greyer than ever, and of his son Ellery was cordial enough. We had been more than friends in the old days; perhaps, too, the vinous air of Italy was too heady a cure for their dust-choked Manhattan memories. In any case, they seemed profoundly glad to see me. Mrs. Ellery Queen—Ellery was now the husband of a glorious creature and the startled father of an infant who resembled his grandfather to an extraordinary degree—was as gracious as the name she bore.4 Even Djuna,5 no longer the scapegrace6 I had known, greeted me with every sign of nostalgia.

  Despite Ellery’s desperate efforts to make me forget New York and appreciate the lofty beauties of his local scenery, I had not been in their tiny villa for many days before a devilish notion took possession of me and I began to pester poor Ellery to death. I have something of a reputation for persistence, if no other virtue; so that before I left, Ellery in despair agreed to compromise. He took me into his library, locked the door and attacked an old steel filing-cabinet. After a slow search he managed to bring out what I suspect was under his fingers all the time. It was a faded manuscript bound Ellery-like in blue legal paper.

  The argument raged. I wished to leave his beloved Italian shores with the
manuscript in my trunk, whereas he insisted that the sheaf of contention remain hidden in the cabinet. Old Richard was wrenched away from his desk, where he was writing a treatise for a German magazine on “American Crime and Methods of Detection,” to settle the affair. Mrs. Queen held her husband’s arm as he was about to close the incident with a workmanlike fist; Djuna clucked gravely; and even Ellery, Jr., extracted his pudgy hand from his mouth long enough to make a comment in the gurgle-language of his kind.

  The upshot of it all was that “The Roman Hat Mystery” went back to the States in my luggage. Not unconditionally, however—Ellery is a peculiar man. I was forced solemnly and by all I held dear to swear that the identities of my friends and of the important characters concerned in the story be veiled by pseudonyms; and that, on pain of instant annihilation, their names be permanently withheld from the reading public.

  Consequently “Richard Queen” and “Ellery Queen” are not the true names of those gentlemen. Ellery himself made the selections; and I might add at once that his choices were deliberately contrived to baffle the reader who might endeavor to ferret the truth from some apparent clue of anagram.7

  “The Roman Hat Mystery” is based on records actually in the police archives of New York City. Ellery and his father, as usual, worked hand-in-hand on the case. During this period in his career Ellery was a detective-story writer of no mean reputation. Adhering to the aphorism that truth is often stranger than fiction, it was his custom to make notes of interesting investigations for possible use in his murder tales. The affair of the Hat so fascinated him that he kept unusually exhaustive notes, at his leisure coördinating the whole into fiction form, intending to publish it. Immediately after, however, he was plunged into another investigation which left him scant opportunity for business; and when this last case was successfully closed, Ellery’s father, the Inspector, consummated a lifelong ambition by retiring and moving to Italy, bag and baggage. Ellery, who had in this affair* found the lady of his heart, was animated by a painful desire to do something “big” in letters; Italy sounded idyllic to him; he married with his father’s blessing and the three of them, accompanied by Djuna, went off to their new European home. The manuscript was utterly forgotten until I rescued it.