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27
The Detective Story
Catherine Ross Nickerson
In one of her early Kinsey Milhone stories, “ The Parker Shotgun, ” Sue Grafton has
her detective looking for a rare and valuable shotgun that is key evidence in a brutal
murder. When Milhone walks into the room where a suspect keeps his collection of
fi rearms on display in glass cases, she notices a shotgun propped up in a corner. Upon
examination, it proves not to be the one she is searching for. “ Too bad, ” she tells us.
“ I ’ m always hoping for the obvious ” (Hillerman 660). While this private investigator
may be looking for quick and easy dispositions of her cases, we, the readers, are not.
We know what we want when we open a detective story. An oddball investigator is
fun; an interesting locale is nice; the crime can, initially anyway, be either bizarre or
commonplace. What any detective story really needs is a plot that becomes more and
more complicated and confusing until our sleuth sorts out the false leads from the
true ones, clears the obfuscations, and explains how it all happened. Readers of detec-
tive fi ction demand a balance between predictability and innovation, just as they want
plenty of digression before the expected resolution. Curiously, many avid fans of
detective fi ction feel the need to disparage their own beloved genre, even to other
fans, as “ fl uff, ” “ what I read to get to sleep, ” even “ junk. ”
There are two main reasons why fans and detractors of detective fi ction put down
the genre. One rap is that it is formulaic, and so therefore hovers somewhere near
what LeRoy Panek calls “ the sub - literary ” (5). The other reason is that it does not
seem quite right to take pleasure in stories about the untimely ends of others.
Raymond Chandler dryly observed that it is diffi cult to champion the detective story:
“ It is usually about murder and hence lacks the element of uplift ” (2). But there is
another way to look at detective fi ction and its formula. Bobbi Ann Mason, while
poking fun at the Nancy Drew series, once compared their plots to sonnets, “ endless
variations on an infl exible form ” (79). And while the characterization is meant as a
joke, it does in fact point us toward the larger truth that even the loftiest literature
has conventions, rules, formulae. Ross MacDonald, one of the main heirs of the hard -
boiled style of Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, asserts that there “ may be more to
426
Catherine Ross Nickerson
convention than meets the eye. … The literary detective has provided writers since
Poe with a disguise, a kind of welder ’ s mask enabling us to handle dangerously hot
material ” (25). Those same conventions may also defl ect the most devastating aspects
of the subject for the reader, allowing us to consider “ dangerously hot material ” about
villains, victims, and heroes at any given historical moment: how and why people
hurt each other, who is most vulnerable, who does these bad deeds and pretends they
didn ’ t, who is able to expose fatal secrets, capture the guilty, and avenge the dead.
In this chapter, I hope to make the case for why we should take the detective story
seriously, for what it can indicate about the way fi ction in general works, and for what
it can suggest about the way a culture expresses itself through popular forms. While
the complex questions about genre that detective fi ction raises will be discussed at
greater length later in the chapter, I want now to clarify my focus. “ Mystery fi ction ”
and “ detective fi ction ” are often used interchangeably – not without reason, but in
ways that can be confusing. Otto Penzler, the tireless editor and anthologizer of these
kinds of stories, offers us a useful distinction: “ I regard the detective story as one
subgenre of a much bigger category, which I defi ne as any short work in which a
crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the plot ” (Hiaasen ix). Many of the most
famous American mysteries, including the work of James M. Cain, Patricia High-
smith, and Cornell Woolrich, fall into that larger category of suspenseful narrative
about crimes and secrets. Detective stories, to state the obvious, need a detective. He
or she can be a cop, a professional private eye, an amateur busybody, a lawyer, or an
ordinary person who takes on an effective investigatory role.
However, what defi nes detective fi ction is more a matter of structure than of
content. When we read a detective story, Tzvetan Todorov explains, we are really
coping with two narrative lines (58 – 9). One is a story we follow in a linear way, which
is the story of the investigation: where a body was found, how the detective fi gure
was called in, what physical evidence was in place, interviews with witnesses and
suspects, any secondary crimes that seem related to the fi rst, right through to the end
when the detective presents the solution to the mystery. The second narrative is the
story of how and why the murder or murders occurred, who committed the act, who
may have conspired with the actual murderer, and what they did to destroy evidence
or mislead the detective. This second story is fragmented, and has been made that
way deliberately by the guilty party, who is often drawn into elaborate efforts to keep
the detective from putting the pieces back together. For when the detective is able
to reconstruct the second narrative, the criminals are exposed, and the story of the
investigation comes to a triumphant end. It is not a coincidence that a conspiracy to
commit a crime is commonly called a “ plot ” in a detective story: detective and villain
are competing authors, or plotters, who each wish to control the narrative. This
doubled structure draws our attention to the very nature of narrative authority. It
dramatizes the claim that any narrative makes to be an accurate retelling of things
that happened in the past.
The doubled structure of detective fi ction creates complex relationships between
the triad of characters at the heart of the story: the investigator, the criminal, and the
The Detective Story
427
victim. It creates even more complex relationships between the author, the investiga-
tor, the narrator (or narrative voice) and the reader. Again, the detective story shows
the scaffolding of all narrative: storytelling comes out of a struggle for authority.
Sometimes it is a struggle between characters for a claim to truth, and sometimes it
is a struggle between the storyteller and the reader. Like Scheherazade, the storyteller
fears the premature end that comes with losing the interest of the audience. The
readers of a detective story can be an active and judgmental audience, repeatedly
measuring the unfolding narrative against the known formula. The paradigmatic
detective story needs suspense – the delay of the answers to all the questions it raises
– but it also needs to reward the patient reader with the satisfaction of knowing what
happened.
To understand how all these structural features play out in detective stories, let us
go back to the beginning, and Edgar Allan Poe ’ s trio of tales featuring Auguste Dupin
as an amateur investigator of crime. Published between 1841 and 1845, these “ tales
of ratiocination ” are widely acknowledged as the fi rst American detective narratives,
and the model for the modern detective story around the world. The template that
Poe offers in his Dupin tales ( “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue, ” “ The Murder of
Marie Roget ” and “ The Purloined Letter ” ) works like this: A serious crime is known
to have been committed, and neither the police nor the newspapers can make head
or tail of it. Someone far smarter than the police, the criminal, the narrator, and the
reader undertakes the solution of the crime. Poe, through his narrator, makes us
believe that Dupin is a genius, possessed of an intelligence that is not simply greater
than that of an ordinary person, but of a different order of magnitude altogether.
The intellectual superiority of the detective fi gure, in particular, shapes the rela-
tionships between author, detective, narrator, and reader. Julian Hawthorne put it
this way in an introduction to an anthology called Library of the World ’ s Greatest
Mystery and Detective Stories (1907) : “ Reader and writer sit down to a game, as it were,
with the odds, of course altogether on the latter ’ s side. … [T]he detective appears to
be in the writer ’ s pay, and aids in the deception by leading the reader off on false
scents ” (10). Many readers of these stories try to keep ahead of the detective, and the
writer has to create a scenario that is ultimately logical, but apparent for most of the
story only to the unparalleled genius of his detective character. Hawthorne suggests
that readers of detective fi ction are made acutely aware of the fact the author is teasing
them, dropping hints, and deliberately confusing them. In “ The Murders in the Rue
Morgue, ” Poe simultaneously offers and obfuscates crucial clues by placing them in
the testimony of people whose recollections don ’ t make sense and who certainly don ’ t
understand the signifi cance of what they are conveying. Through our fi rst - person nar-
rator, we read the newspaper reports of several witnesses who heard two people
arguing, but who can ’ t agree on what language was being spoken by one of them. At
the time we read that passage, it sounds to us that people were too far away to hear
clearly or that perhaps the reporters got it wrong; later Dupin explains that contem-
plating those discrepancies created a breakthrough in his thinking and allowed him
to consider a non - human assailant.
428
Catherine Ross Nickerson
The other way i
n which Poe orchestrates the writer - detective - reader triad is to
introduce a narrator who is not nearly as clever as Dupin; we receive all our informa-
tion from a character who is in awe of his friend ’ s intellectual gifts. Arthur Conan
Doyle, of course, made this technique famous in the character of Doctor Watson, who
is so obtuse that we all feel a little better about our own inability to keep up with
Sherlock Holmes. The function of Poe ’ s narrator is a little more complicated; there is
an erotic tension in their partnership, and a kind of intellectual rivalry in the structure
of the stories. While our narrator cannot ratiocinate his way to the Ourang - Outang,
he can frame the stories to include long disquisitions on the intellect that show him
to be cerebral and sophisticated. The fi rst several pages of “ The Murders in the Rue
Morgue ” are a disquisition on the relation of imagination and analytic thinking. Much
of the discussion focuses on the relative complexity of different games (chess, checkers,
whist, and, later, in “ The Purloined Letter, ” evens - odds) and the exact mental faculties
they require. In some ways, the discussion of games could just as easily be a discussion
of reading detective fi ction (as Poe understands it), of the game of wits and the com-
petition to spy the clues. Our narrator invites us to make that connection at the
transition into the body of the story: “ The narrative which follows will appear to the
reader somewhat in the light of a commentary on the propositions just advanced ”
(Poe 6).
While it is clear that Dupin is smarter than anybody, the narrator is at pains to
point out the exact nature of his analytic genius: a mind that “ disentangles ” puzzles,
like crime scenes that are locked up tight from the inside, and brings them to neat
resolutions (Poe 3). But our narrator wants us to understand that Dupin also generates
narratives: In his opening remarks he asserts that “ [i]t will be found, in fact that the
ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic ”
(Poe 6). He takes it a step further “ with the fancy of a double Dupin – the creative
and the resolvent ” (Poe 7). The powerful impulse toward creativity with which Poe
imbued his detective has stayed with the genre over the last century and a half. An
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 92