The History of the Mystery

Academic Sayers

Dorothy Sayers came from an academic background and her tastes were literary. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, she worked in publishing and in advertising. In 1920 wanting to make extra money, she began the research needed for a mystery novel. The book, Whose Body, was published 1923 was a success, encouraging her to continue writing. In the first books Lord Peter is an anateur investigator who possesses money and position, both useful in the society of the place and period. Sayers eventually provided Lord Peter with a partner, Harriet Vane, who, although from the common folk, and not beautiful, is a professional, a strong, intelligent nurse who is an independent person. Their relationship offers the novelist an opportunity to explore the social strata of the era.

While all of the Lord Peter novels feature conversations that reveal literary interests, Gaudy Night (1956) is set in Oxford. Sayers explains in an Author's Note to the University of Oxford that she has presented it with a Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor of my own manufacture and with a college of 150 women student in excess of the limit ordained by statute. Harriet Vane comes to Oxford for a reunion, and as is usual with detectives, she becomes involved in solving a murder. Lord Peter eventually enters the story.

Sayers's history of detective fiction is reprinted in Allen and Chacko's Detective Fiction. As do most critics, she credits the wayward genius of Edgar Allen Poe and his first five stories in which he set forth the principles of the detective story. He fused two strains of earlier literature, the pure horror story and the pure detection study to create the mystery. Looking back at tales from various cultures, she questions why the detective story did not appear earlier. She quotes E.M. Wong who wrote that detectives cannot flourish until the public has an idea of what constitutes proof, and while a common criminal procedure is arrest, torture, confession, and death.� Sayers takes this one step further, adding that the detective story could not flourish until public sympathy had veered around to the side of law and order. In earlier crime stories people felt sympathy with the criminals, because the law was oppressive and punishment brutal.

In Sayers' view the detective story is particularly attractive to the English, who tend to side with law and order, and who like concrete details of people, things and places. Once an efficient police force was in place, the public sided with them and with crime-solvers. In America the English tradition held sway, as Poe created the detective and the public took the side of Dupin, the eccentric detective. In that tradition subsequent mysteries often featured eccentrics, beginning with Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Watson often commented on his friend's peculiarities, including Holmes's particular scientific interests, which lay only in those matters affecting crime solving. Sayers does not think Holmes always plays fair with the reader as he looks at a minute object and makes a brilliant deduction. The reader may not know what the object is. Sayers notes that readers had become more exacting. They want to be on equal footing with the detective in regard to clues and discoveries. Writing detective stories was becoming more difficult, as readers wanted strict technical accuracy even in small details. The author must give the reader every clue, but the reader must not understand the detective's deductions too far ahead of the solution to the mystery. The author's problem is to show the reader everything the detective sees and learns, and still not solve the mystery. So the author does some misleading, for instance, the early deductions of the detective lead to false conclusions.

A skilled author, such as E.C. Bentley, in his Trent's Last Case, also uses various viewpoints, one being the Watson viewpoint, when the detective's external actions are seen by the reader. The second viewpoint is when the reader sees what the detective sees, but is not told what the detective knows. The third viewpoint is when reader and detective know the facts and the conclusion at the same time. Examples of the three viewpoints are given. The first is a description of a room and its contents when the detective enters, the second, the detective searches everything, then sits, looking gloomy. Finally, his attention goes to the display of photographs which is described in detail, the resemblance between two persons is evident. So the reader makes a deduction along with the detective.

Although Sayers admits that writing a mystery story is not easy, she does not think mysteries rise to the highest level of literary art. The structure of a story, the plot is admirable, in the Aristotelian sense of having a beginning, a middle, and an end, as it presents a problem, gives the details, and provides a solution. The reader does not experience the terrible emotions that drive the murdered to the crime, the crime has already been committed. It is difficult as an author to go from a detached perspective of the investigator to the characters having a human point of view when confronted with a horrible event and great suffering of those affected. G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown simply avoids the issue, he is interested in the criminal's confession, so avoiding the arrest and trial. The difficult task for other authors is to create a criminal with some good human characteristics and a detective who does not only act mechanically but has human sympathy.

Sayers concludes that characters are becoming more credible and lively with more complexity. The evil-doer may possess some human qualities. Further, the newer mysteries of her era avoided having the most unlikely person be the criminal. There is more complexity to the novels. The novelists of her day were avoiding repetition of past works by studying the technology and medical advances of the time. They were finding and using more means of murder such as freezing to atoms in liquid air. Mystery novels were developing new strategies to satisfy readers' demands.

Essentially, however, many books like the novels of John Dickson Carr followed what was becoming a tradition, the cozy mystery. Literary commentators such as W.H. Auden described the characteristics of the mystery are: a closed society in which the rules are evident, a crime that is usually murder, a carefully crafted plot, a number of suspects, an intelligent detective, several clues, some false, a final scene where all is revealed.

In the United States writers began creating cozies. One of the most influential was Ellery Queen, a confusing name because it is both the name of a fictional detective and a psueudonym used by two cousins, Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. Their first published novel was The Roman Hat Mystery (1920).Their career spanned 42 years, their stories of Ellery Queen have been made into movies and television dramas. They also produced Ellery Queen�s Mystery Magazine which, like the Strand Magazine in England provided a place for authors to submit short publications, thus giving newcomers an opportunity to be in print.

The spirit of rebellion arose in the United States, however, when some writers spoke against the cozy and its rules. Such novels were not true to the mean streets of the big cities where crimes were violent and if rules were made at all, they were broken. Especially during prohibition, criminals were notorious, for instance, Al Capone in Chicago. The police, many taking bribes and fearing reprisal from mobsters were ineffectual in carrying out justice. But there could be a single person, a private investigator, who would rise up as a contemporary bearer of justice. The American P.I. came into being, a detective who fits into the tough style in American fiction, that Allen and Chacko say is a style influenced by Ernest Hemingway: hard, accurate, terse, avoiding a certain kind of sentiment while provoking perhaps a different kind. Detective stories featuring action, common everyday language, violence appeared after World War I in pulp action magazines that also contained Westerns, adventure tales, and war stories. American society was ready for tough new literature. After the war, Americans experienced the boom of the 1920s with youth including young women enjoying new freedom and money, the crime wave with prohibition, the depression.