TOPIC 60: AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION: D. HAMMETT AND R.

CHANDLER
ENGLISH DETECTIVE NOVEL: P.D. JAMES

INTRODUCTION:
Detective fiction is a branch of crime fiction in which the detective either professional or
amateur, investigate a crime, usually a murder. Detective fiction flourished in the early
20th century, although it is more often considered to have begun in 1841 with the
publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, by Edgar Allan Poe who is known as the
Father of Detective Fiction. The Detective has always been related to public interest in
the problems of modern, urban life, particularly in crime. But crime as a feature was not
generally recognized until the rise of large cities in the early 1800s, a period that
corresponds to the creation of a mass reading public.

DETECTIVE FICTION: BEGINNINGS

The idea of detection and the figure of the detective that would eventually stand at the
centre of the genre were introduced in the early 19 th century by a Frenchman, Francois-
Eugene Vidocq in his Memoirs of Vidocq. He served as a soldier, privateer, secrete
police and spy and he published his memoir in France in 1828, they were immediately
popular and translated into English.
Interest in England in “crime stories” blended with the gothic novel. Most scholars
attribute this genre to Horace Walpole who established the horror story and Mary Shelly
with Frankenstein added scientific aspects in 1818.
Vidocq most influenced Charles Dickens among English writers and Edgar Allan Poe
among American writers. Poe with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue in
1841 laid out the basis of the detective story. He introduced three common motifs of
detective fiction:
- the wrongly suspected man
- the crime in the locked room
- the solution by unexpected means
By 1870 detective fiction had a popular audience in America, and in 1875 Allan
Pinkerton published The Expressman and the Detective, the earliest American non-
fiction account of a private detective. This popular book established the importance of
both the hero, an extra-legal agent who explores a lawless world. Pinkerton understood
that the public was interested in the immersion of the eye into an almost surreal
underworld.
In England, by contrast, the detective genre underwent a more analytic, stylized
development, exemplified in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle. His A study inScarlet in
1887 introduced the sturdy Watson and the observant, decayed aesthete Sherlock
Holmes. Doyle’s adapted Poe’s formulae but change his elaborate introductions by
conversational exchanges between his two chief characters, and emphasized Poe’s
realistic feature: the deduction of astonishing conclusions from trifling clues.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GENRE:

Detective fiction is a type of fiction featuring a crime (a murder in most cases) that is
solved by the protagonist, a detective, through the use of deductive reasoning from a
series of clues. Characterisation, setting and description are sometimes as important as
the twists and turns of the plot, in which clues and red-herrings alike are introduced to
the reader as the detective comes across them.
Although the genre has evolved through the years, the basic elements of detective
fiction have remained unchanged:
- a baffling crime that usually occurs at the beginning of the story
- an often-eccentric sleuth who solves the case through an impressive display of logic,
- several suspects
- an unexpected conclusion.

Detective fiction should be distinguished from mysteries, which are more general works
of fiction concerning any type of mystery, and which may or may not involve a detective
and his/her deductive reasoning. While both detective fiction and crime novels involve a
crime, the focus of the crime novels is on the criminal rather than the detective (though
a detective may be involved), and on his/her psychological state rather than on the
crime-solver’s investigations and efforts to identify the criminal.

Detective fiction include:

- the police procedural: where the mystery is solved by detailed police or detective
work
- the inverted novel: where the identity of the criminal is known from the beginning and
only the method or the motive remains to be discovered.

- the “hard-boiled school” of private investigators: an American subgenre that had

appeared in the 1920s and began to eclipse classic detective fiction in America during
the 40s. Classic detective fiction regards society as an orderly world in which crimes are
abnormal occurrences and order is restored by the crime-solving detective. But in the
world of hard-boiled detective fiction, gangsters reign, chaos and violence are the norm,
and the detective only temporarily provides relief from a dysfunctional world. In classic
detective novels the police are honest, if often inept, servants of the law, hard-boiled
detective stories are typically set on mean city streets, where the police force is usually
corrupt. Practitioners of hard-boiled stories found it difficult to gain recognition in
particular because such stories were not initially considered to be literature. In fact,
those stories were first published in pulp magazines: Black Mask. Dashiell Hammet
with his Sam Spade and Raymond Chandle with his Philip Marlowe are two of the
most famous writers of this style.

The detective, in the detective novels, is presumed to have a set of ethics or moral
values. These are called the detective code. According to Richard Layman, the
detective should be anonymous, avoid publicity, be close-mouthed, and secretive. He or
she protects good people from bad people, who do not live by the rules. The detective
ignores the rules and conventions of behaviour, because the client pays for this. Loyalty
to the client is very important, but may be superseded by a personal sense of justice or
the rule of law. The detective must keep an emotional distance from the people in the
case, retain an objective point of view, and consider all pertinent clues.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF DETECTIVE FICTION:

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction refers to the years between the two World Wars
(1920-1939), and the Golden Age detective fiction writers are those who were working
in England at the time, including among others Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha
Christie. Of course, many authors wrote after that period and numerous writers still
today adopt Golden Age conventions. These conventions are:
- The reader must have equal opportunity with the hero/heroine for solving the mystery.
There must be clues, and all of them must be available to the reader.
- There must be a corpse, the earlier, the better. The reader should care about the
victim.
- The guilty person must have a prominent part in the story.
- The criminal must be caught through the deductions of the hero/heroine, not by
accident or coincidence; and those deductions must be logical, sensible and not absurd
or magical/supernatural.
- There should be multiple possible suspects.
- Accuracy is essential, especially in details.
AMERICAN AUTHORS:

DASHIELL HAMMET (1894-1961):

Dashiell Hammett wrote his first fiction under the pseudonym Peter Collinson. He was
son of a farmer and a politician. He left school at 14 to help support the family and he
had many different jobs, including in a Detective Agency as an operator, which gave
him many of the basis for his novels.

In 1923, the first short story by Hammett appeared in Black Mask. Thanks to the
adventures of a short, overweight, unnamed detective, known as The Continental Op
the author became a popular writer.

By the 30s, he decided to create a new character, Sam Spade, a rough and solitary
man who worked outside the law. This independent detective made his first appearance
in what was to become Hammett’s most famous work, The Maltese Falcon(1930), a
story of greed and betrayal where Spade finds involved with an odd assortment of
characters, all searching a black statue of a bird. No one had any idea that this novel
would be such a success and would be filmed three times and become a film classic.
Following his masterpiece, his last two novels would follow: The Glass Sky (1931)
(Hammet’s favourite novel) and The Thin Man(1934), which never reached the
standards of the previous one.

Hammett’s language was unsentimental, journalistic; moral judgements were left to the
reader.

In the 1930s Hammett became politically active. He joined the Communist Party which
even led him to have his books away from the shelves of American libraries.

Despite his output being limited to five novels (but over 80 short stories), Hammett
remains one of the most influential writers of his time. He has had a profound effect on
cinema too.

RAYMOND CHANDLER (1888-1959):

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago but he was seven his mother took him to
England to be raised by his mother and his mother’s family. He received a classic
education. He wrote for some periodicals in London but decided to go back to the
United States in 1912. At the age of 32 he was given a job in an oil business, and this
experience led him to criticize the corruption of such industries, as he does in The Big
Sleep. Chandler was fired from the job and this made him set his mind against the
corporate world and began to once again dedicate his time to writing. He began to read
pulp novels, especially those of Dashiell Hammett. Chandler began to write for the
Black Mask, a magazine that published detective fiction and mysteries.

He wrote his first novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939. The publication of this novel came
with the heart of the Great Depression and just before the start of World War II.
Therefore, the novel carries with it much of the cynicism of 19030s America. The catchy
dialogue of the main character, Philip Marlowe, is the epitome of what came to be
known as “hard-boiled” style, the racy, clever, tough street talk of the detective
narrative. Philip Marlow is the private detective that would accompany Chandler in
almost all his novels. He is an educated, modern gentleman always betrayed by friends,
women and lying clients but always finding his way to light. Philip Marlowe, together
with Sam Spade, would become the prototype of private-eye between the 30s and the
50s: solitary, hard but tender, cynic and disillusioned but good man at the same time.
Their sensibility usually dashes with the brutal and sordid environment. The Big Sleep
broke away from the previous style of detective fiction, which includes narratives such
as the novels of Agatha Christie. Chandler not only broke away from the language of
previous detective fiction, but was also unconventional in plotting, in his plays with
order, and in the addition of more than one plotline. Chandler’s innovation led to the film
style of the 1940s and 1950s called film noir.

Other novels are: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in
the Lake (1943), The Long Goodbye( 1953), etc. The quality of his novels would make
that almost all of them have been adapted to cinema.

BRITISH AUTHORS:

PHYLLIS DOROTHY JAMES (1920 -):

Phyllis Dorothy is one of the most famous living mystery writers. Her job in the criminal
policy department (where she became involved with forensic investigations) made her
fiction be underpinned by strong factual detail. She started writing in the 1960s and has
been major prizes for her crime writing in Great Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia.

Jame’s works date back to Agatha Christie’s ingenious plotting and evocative settings.
Her plots are balanced and her settings reflect an impressive variety of interests, often
esoteric and sometimes obscure.

Her first novel, Cover Her Face (1962), introduced the character of the romantic Adam
Dalgliesh, a police detective who is also a reputable poet. He will also appear in A Mind
to Murder (1963), Unnatural Causes (1967), The Black Tower (1975), Death of an
Expert Witness (1977), A Taste for Death (1986), and her latest The Murder Room
(2003).

Her other main character, the private detective Cordelia Gray, features in An Unsuitable
Job for a Woman (1972) and The Skull Beneath the Skin(1982).

Neither Dalgliesh nor Gray takes a particular leading role but the rest of the characters
are also important. In this sense, James escapes from the codes of traditional detective
fiction. The people involved in the crime, then, either directly or marginally, guilty or
innocent, are the main focus of her novels. Her books are extremely well structured and
one can say that every page has been carefully planned beforehand. Readers are given
all the facts so that they can start working out ‘who has done it’. James gives a lot of
background information, too. Her passion for detail is very Dickensian and this gives the
reader a strong image of how the characters look like and the environment they are set
in. The pace of reading is therefore slow, detailed and perfectionist which may fall into
boredom for some readers.

CONCLUSION
In this topic I have dealt with detective fiction which is, probably, the genre that calls our
ESO student’s attention best. We can work with our students through graded books
from the ESO1 as they will be able to choose among many titles from Agatha Christie,
Arthur Conan Doyle, etc. Thanks to the many filmed versions of detective novels they
are, most of them, familiar with characters as Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, etc.
Apart from working with the book, we can also watch the many films produced, as The
Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep with Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe or the very
famous Murder on the Orient Express.
With higher levels we can also ask our students to write a short detective fiction
themselves, either on their own or in small groups. Through this exercise they will work
all aspects of grammar, vocabulary but also listening, as we can put the stories in
common.

www.wikipedia.org

www.britannica.com

The Offical Websites of Raymond Cahndler and P.D. James

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, by Nina Baym. New York: Norton & Co.
1998

The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories by T. Hillerman. Oxford University

Press 1997