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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Crime fiction, across all its wide and varied sub-categories—locked room, noir, golden age, etc.—is possibly the purest form of popular fiction in existence today. Its roots date back nearly two hundred years and yet its popularity continues unabated. Here we trace its long and varied roots... There is a temptation to believe that chronicling the dark and ugly side of the human spirit through the mediums of gritty landscapes, criminal masterminds, fiendish plots and dangerous women began the day that Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett put down the whisky bottles and started hammering the keys of their Royal Portables. Not so. When the fascination with twisted plots and devilish murders first started, gentlemen wrapped themselves in worsted and ladies wore button-up boots. The first accredited crime story was a hunt for a priceless and sinister gem stolen from its rightful owners in colonial India and brought to the South Coast of England in Wilkie Collins’ "The Moonstone" (1868). This story, described by T. S. Eliot as ‘the first and greatest of English detective novels’, created in one fell swoop most of the archetypes of detective fiction we later became so familiar with: the isolated country house, the family of quality with a shady past and the staid, tweed-wrapped policeman despatched to solve the case and restore Victorian England to its previous stainless self. This latter was a creation that British writers have possibly adopted with more success than anyone else—the phenomenon of the ‘funny, little man’, all quirks and idiosyncrasies, often with a quiet, unassuming manner yet possessing a brain like a steel trap. While Collins is often referred to as the ‘grandfather of English detective fiction’, from the opposite side of the Atlantic the work of Edgar Allen Poe has been said to have laid the groundwork for the modern mystery. Poe’s Auguste Dupin was thought to have been the first-ever fictional detective and was also possibly the first instance of a detective who was not attached to the police force—the ‘hobbyist detective’. Dupin investigated the grisly and horrifying "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), which was in many ways the archetypal locked room mystery. Many consider this tale to be a direct ancestor of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries, both because of the similarities between the detective protagonists and because of its use of rationale deduction. Sherlock Holmes, ably and enthusiastically assisted by the much underrated Dr. Watson, first appeared in 1887 in "A Study in Scarlet" and again in 1890 in "The Sign of Four", but it wasn’t until the short stories (beginning with "A Scandal in Bohemia") began to be published in The Strand Magazine that Holmes became the phenomenon we now know. His popularity was such that when he fell from the Reichenbach Falls in "The Final Problem", the young gentlemen of London took to wearing black crepe on their hats as a sign of mourning. The appearance of Holmes was the first time that a detective, or for that matter, a group of criminals, were directly associated with the territory they appeared in. Moreover, Holmes and Watson do not simply blend seamlessly into 1890’s London—they virtually define it. Victorian London would have been a far more sinister place to live without the two of them in their bullet-pocked and fug-filled rooms in Baker Street. Holmes’ mysteries spanned the country houses of Europe and the foggy streets of London’s poor. As a character, dustmen, shopkeepers, police constables and members of the Admiralty alike respected him. He was experienced and worldly wise enough to fool everyone from fisherman to clergy into thinking that he was one of them. In many ways Holmes was considerably more sophisticated than many of the crime heroes and heroines of the ‘Golden Age’ who swished onto the scene in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. Almost exclusively of British creation, these are the giants of crime fiction that spawned countless films, TV series and spin-offs: namely Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Whimsey, Miss Jane Marple and, to a lesser degree, Albert Campion. Mysteries of the Golden Age formed the basis of what is known today as the classic ‘whodunnit’ and were often in the form of clever puzzles with surprising solutions that emphasized careful, realistic detective work. The mysteries of Agatha Christie epitomized this style and she is widely acknowledged as the Queen of the Golden Age, followed closely by Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham. While these women and their contemporaries defined a genre that reigned supreme for nearly two decades, the cosy settings that earmarked this era – the elegant country houses, gentlemen's clubs and grand hotels —were eventually to give way to a harsher, grittier version of reality. |
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