A Companion to the American Short Story

by Alfred Bendixen

  easily parodied moment in a detective story is the one in which the investigator

  gathers all involved in the crime and its investigation and dramatically presents a

  fully coherent narrative of the misdeeds and the misdoers. But at heart, and as intro-

  duced by Poe, the moment of telling the whole story is really about the rivalry

  between the detective and the criminal to control the narration of the crime. The

  detective is charged with creating the true and coherent story of how a crime occurred

  and who is responsible, while the thief or killer schemes to fragment the storyline.

  However, the pieces they inevitably leave in place, or leave in view, become the clues

  (bits of paper, fragile alibis, things witnesses see, hear, smell) that allow the detective

  to reconstruct the tale of the crime and its cover - up. It is therefore almost a compul-

  sion on the part of fi ctional detectives to let their rivals know they have been bested,

  and to do it in the form of textual or linguistic exchange – a sort of narrative victory

  lap. Near the end of “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue, ” Dupin coaxes the sailor to

  his house not only to prove to himself that he was correct in his reconstruction, but

  to let the sailor know exactly how he fi gured it out. At the resolution of

  “

  The

  The Detective Story

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  Purloined Letter, ” Dupin cannot resist creating a facsimile letter that will let Minister

  D

  —

  know that it was indeed he who understood the scheme and re

  -

  purloined

  the letter.

  At the same time as villains and detectives are locked in a power struggle, there

  is a profound intimacy between them. At the beginning of “ The Murders in the Rue

  Morgue ” and then again near the end of “ The Purloined Letter, ” our narrator asserts

  that excellence at simple games like checkers and evens - odds requires the intellectual

  acumen to “ admeasure ” one ’ s opponent and the imagination to “ identify ” completely

  with his or her intellectual proclivities. Dupin explains that the Prefect ’ s inability to

  see a stolen letter hidden in plain view is symptomatic of his mediocre intellect: “ the

  Prefect and his cohort fail so frequently, fi rst by default of this identifi cation and,

  secondly, by ill - admeasurement. … They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity;

  and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would

  have hidden it. ” (Poe 92 – 3). And that, of course, is what a detective must do: think

  like a murderer to catch a murderer. In Poe ’ s stories this is a comfortable premise;

  Dupin is, after all, well acquainted with Minister D — . He alludes to their shared

  past, he is close enough to drop in on the Minister at his apartment, he knows that

  his true personality is different from the one he projects, he knows what conversational

  subject will distract his foe while he scans the room. Both write poetry, and each can

  identify the other ’ s handwriting on sight. Clearly, Minister D — and Auguste Dupin

  are the sort of doubles that Poe so enjoyed portraying. They are so intimate that, with

  their shared initial and the hint that Dupin comes from an “ illustrious ” (Poe 6) family

  and that Minister D — has a brother, David Lehman wittily concludes that they are

  brothers (95 – 6). In any case, his relationship with Minister D — draws Dupin out of

  his armchair and into the most active investigative role of the three tales. He not only

  fi nds the letter with his own eyes, but also takes it upon himself to steal it back. His

  objective is to protect the honor of the noblewoman involved, which has political

  implications as well.

  Poe thus introduces the idea that detectives not only think like criminals, but

  sometimes commit criminal acts in service to their personal sense of justice. The

  blurring of the line between detectives and the crooks they pursue is not always as

  playful as it is in Poe ’ s story. Many detectives, especially in the hard - boiled style, are

  morally ambiguous. Others are changed by their intimacy with treachery, greed, lust,

  betrayal, and violence. They may become cynical, they may become enraged by the

  cruelty they see around them, or they may fi nd relief from their own demons in

  chasing down villains. Readers sometimes wonder if they are being changed by

  reading about these worlds of crime and the characters who inhabit them, and that

  is part of the reason for the apologies readers make; every reader knows someone who

  disapproves of the content of crime fi ction. One of the most common complaints

  concerns the glorifi cation or aestheticization of violence and villainy in detective

  stories; to this way of thinking, these stories encourage something deeply corrosive

  to the social fabric. Ross MacDonald turns that premise on its head when he remarks

  that “ [a]n unstable balance between reason and more primitive human qualities is

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  Catherine Ross Nickerson

  characteristic of the detective story. For both writer and reader it is an imaginative

  arena where such confl icts can be worked out safely, under artistic controls ” (11). In

  other words, detective fi ction civilizes us.

  While we have looked at several of the relationships between the players in the

  detective story, we haven

  ’

  t yet taken up the question of the dynamic between

  the reader and the villain. In her 1913 textbook for a correspondence course in “ The

  Technique of the Detective Story,

  ”

  Carolyn Wells, a prolifi c writer of mysteries

  herself, offers the following advice on creating a villain: “ he must be both intelligent

  and ingenious, in order to give the Transcendent Detective a foeman worthy of his

  steel. The reader must have no liking or pity for him. In his perfection he should be

  what Poe calls ‘ that monstrum horrendum , an unprincipled man of genius. ’ Moreover,

  he must be cleverly drawn to conceal his identity to the last. He must appear to be

  what he is not, and he must not appear to be what he is ” (237). If the ideal villain is

  a genius, and thus admirable, but “ unprincipled, ” we can see how he is a double for

  the detective. But can ’ t he or she also be a double for us, the readers? Since we are,

  like the detective, trying to think like a murderer, we must sometimes realize that

  all that differentiates us from the criminals is our principles or other restraints on our

  behavior (and, of course, if we are reading detective stories on our metal bunks in the

  state pen, the identifi cation will be all the stronger).

  In his Postscript to the Name of the Rose , Umberto Eco observes that the only character

  in a detective story who has never committed the murder is the reader (Lehman 2).

  Most of the time we are trying to fi gure out who is the “ least likely suspect, ” that

  person whom Wells says “ does not appear to be what he is, ” and ingenious authors

  have made detectives and even narrators the perpetrators. But as David Lehman points

  out, who is a less likely suspect than ourselves? “ The murderer as the reader? Never

  – which is to say on some implicit, metaphorical level, always. … Readers of detective


  novels participate in perfect murders – perfect because they offer us a vicarious and

  therefore socially acceptable form of releasing our homicidal instincts without ever

  having to face the consequences ” (2). Lehman is not so much questioning the morality

  of reading detective fi ction as he is suggesting that we all feel guilty about something,

  we all wonder what we are capable of under the right circumstances. Again, as

  MacDonald argues, it is the conventions of detective stories that make them safe

  “ arenas where such confl icts can be worked out . ”

  Detective stories, then, raise the big issues about how fi ction works: about what

  makes a narrative authoritative and a believable representation of events. They throw

  the complex relationships between writers, their characters, and readers into high

  relief. They demonstrate the way in which all literature weaves convention and origi-

  nality in complex patterns. Some require us to consider every aspect of human psy-

  chology, the effect of social injustice, how power corrupts, and why terrible fates befall

  fi ne people. Matters of intellect, writing, and speaking are highlighted in Poe ’ s stories,

  which seems natural given the aesthetic temperaments of Dupin and our narrator.

  But even the most hard - boiled detectives spend a lot more time talking to people,

  refl ecting on what they have to say, delivering snappy comebacks, and crafting

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  431

  amusing metaphors than they do shooting pistols and being beaten up. One of

  Hammett ’ s detectives explains to a young murderer how he cracked the case: “ You

  talked too much, son. … That ’ s a way you amateur criminals have. You ’ ve always got

  to overdo the frank and open business

  ”

  (59). Detective fi ction is in fact a genre

  obsessed with language at many levels.

  That preoccupation with language, especially in the form of texts like secret letters

  or forged wills, comes in part from the detective story ’ s relationship to Gothic narra-

  tive. It is a remarkable fact that the modern detective story was created by a writer

  best known for his horror fi ction. Several critics have suggested that Poe invented his

  detective, a machine for “ ratiocination, ” in order to hold the monstrosities of his

  imagination at bay. Other critics adjust their angle of vision slightly, and suggest

  that the detective fi gure is a product of, rather than an outsider to, the disordered and

  frightening world of the Gothic mode. If Gothic narrative develops secrets, compul-

  sions, and sadism to a fever pitch, eventually it also needs to create characters who

  can restore some level of justice and harmony. Detective fi ction – part of that broader

  category of mystery – has remained closely related to the horror genre. We can also

  trace connections to the Western and to science fi ction.

  When we begin to contemplate the wide range of stories that include crimes and

  secrets that require investigation, we are quickly confronted with broader issues

  about literary genre. For one thing, we use the term genre in several ways, applying

  it to different orders of things. It can mean something as broad as the difference

  between epic and lyric poetry, or fi ction and essay. It can apply to the demograph-

  ics of the readership, as in the “ young adult novel. ” Indeed, there is such a term,

  slightly pejorative, as “ genre fi ction, ” which usually includes the popular categories

  of detective, science, and horror fi ction. One is tempted to abandon the term alto-

  gether, but it can be useful when the context is clear. In the study of popular

  culture, genre is a term that usually indicates content; sub - genre can either indicate

  a more narrowly focused content (like “ police procedural ” ) or point to style or tone

  ( “ noir ” ). The main sub - genres of the very broad category of crime writing include

  detective fi ction, spy novels, police procedurals, political thrillers, mysteries. Within

  detective fi ction, we speak of the puzzle story, the domestic style, the golden age

  or classical story, the hard - boiled style, the feminist hard - boiled, the cozy, and on

  and on. Many of these terms overlap, and some are more tied to a specifi c time

  period than others.

  But perhaps the most interesting thing about genre is how quickly genres hybridize

  with each other and how new genres come into being. Sometimes they morph gently

  from one to the other: Dupin becomes Holmes who becomes Hercule Poirot and Miss

  Marple. Other times they are direct refutations of what has come before. In a famous

  manifesto of the hard - boiled style, Chandler mocked the “ golden age ” style (including

  Agatha Christie and her many British and American imitators), declaring that

  “ Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons … and

  with the means at hand, not hand - wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fi sh ”

  (16). Hillerman points out that, since the early twentieth century, the main division

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  Catherine Ross Nickerson

  among writers and readers of detective fi ction has been into two camps: those who

  believe the stories should focus primarily on the puzzle to be solved and those who

  believe the genre can and should be a more expressive form, with fl eshed out charac-

  ters, a deep sense of place, and a desire to portray the strengths and fl aws of American

  culture. These questions about the rivalry and hybridization of genre are not peculiar

  to detective fi ction, and contemplating them invites us to think about the broadest

  issues of originality, infl uence, tradition, expectations of what fi ction is supposed to

  do, and the meaning and uses of “ realism. ”

  Given the multiple sub - genres of the detective story and recurrent debates about

  its capabilities, it is impossible to trace a clean trajectory from Poe to the present day.

  But we can see ways in which creativity and variation are tied to historical moments,

  resulting in new kinds of detective stories that disrupt some of the ideas about gender,

  race, and social class that were established in the fi rst decades of the twentieth century

  (in both the classical and the hard - boiled styles). Notably, a new wave of feminist

  writing emerged with the women ’ s movement in the 1970s. Of course, women had

  been highly successful detective fi ction writers all along, but there was an alignment

  of values and goals between second - wave feminism and the work of Amanda Cross

  (who created her no - nonsense professor - sleuth in 1964), Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton,

  Sara Paretsky, and S. J. Rozan, the last four of whom have done the seemingly

  unthinkable: challenged the premise that the hard - boiled style is only for men. Like-

  wise, we can trace African American crime writing back into the nineteenth century,

  but a reclamation of the detective story began in the 1990s, with the work of Walter

  Mosley, who injects humanity into noir and then turns it on its head, Eleanor Taylor

  Bland, who deliberately tells the stories of people who are voiceless – children, the

  elderly, the mentally ill – and Barbara Neely, who shows how keen an eye a domestic

  servant has. These works came at a time when the mainstream media were particularly

  warpe
d, and especially enthusiastic, in their depiction of African Americans as per-

  petrators of crime, from welfare fraud to drug dealing and gangsterism (in life and in

  rap). They propose a corrective narrative to replace the scenarios where people of color

  are always the perps and never the cops. Hillerman, in his Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee

  series, took the police procedural out of the city and on to the Navajo reservation with

  his stories of contemporary Native American life.

  In spite of all its metafi ctive, epistemological, and social - critical charms, the genre

  is a second - class citizen in the world of letters; this marginalization is a source of pain

  to many writers and publishers of detective fi ction, and has been from its earliest days.

  Of course, many canonical American writers have experimented with the detective

  story, including Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein, and many more

  were infl uenced by it, including Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway,

  Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, and Paul Auster. In the introduc-

  tion to the anthology Women on the Case , Sara Paretsky argues that the struggle of

  women detective fi ction writers is nothing more and nothing less than the struggle

  of all women writers: “ This collection is an attempt to continue the work that Barrett

  Browning began [in Aurora Leigh ], to make it possible for women to broaden the

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  433

  range of their voices, to represent their age for women, to describe women ’ s social

  position, their suffering – and their triumphs ” (xi).

  Hillerman writes that Chandler ’ s “ use of the work of a private detective to illumi-

  nate the corruption of society has attracted into the genre many mystery writers who

  wish to shoot for lofty literary goals. Driven out of the so - called mainstream of

  American writing by the academic critics and the academic trends – minimalism,

  deconstructionism, and whatever is next – we have found a home in the mystery

  form ” (xviii). While detective stories have in fact received the critical attention of

  scholars famous for other subjects

  –

  Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Geoffrey

  Hartman, John Irwin – and while detective fi ction does show up quite frequently in