History, Development and Characteristics of British Detective

PALACKY UNIVERSITY OLOMOUC PHILOSOPHICAL FACULTY
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES
Michaela Veselská
History, Development and Characteristics of British Detective Novel and the Significant Representatives of the Genre
Bachelor Thesis
Thesis Supervisor: PhDr. Libor Práger, Ph.D. Olomouc 2014
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Prohlašuji, že jsem tuto bakalářskou práci vypracovala samostatně a uvedla úplný seznam citované a použité literatury.

V Olomouci dne...........................

Podpis ............................ 1

I would like to thank my supervisor PhDr. Libor Práger, Ph.D. for his guidance, encouragement and advice he provided while I was writing my thesis. I would also like to thank Carol Anderson for her time and patience and last but not least I would like to thank to my family for their patience and love.
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Table of Content
1. Introduction.......................................................................................................................5 2. Historical Development of the Detective Genre .............................................................7
2.1 From the Ancient Detective Literature to the Modern Detective Genre.......................7 2.2 Definition of the Detective Genre and its Subgenres..................................................12 2.3 Specifics of the British Detective Fiction ...................................................................13 3. Analysis of the Characteristic Traces of English Detective Fiction ...........................17 3.1 The Great and Eccentric Detectives ............................................................................17 3.2 The Figure of the Woman Detective ...........................................................................26 3.3 Religion and Detective Fiction in the Figure of the Priest Detective .........................28 3.4 The Figure of the Omnipresent Companion and the Narrator ....................................31 3.5 Typical Setting of the Story ........................................................................................35 4. Traditional Tendencies in Modern Adaptations..........................................................38 5. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................44 6. Resumé.............................................................................................................................46 7. Appendix..........................................................................................................................47 8. Bibliography ....................................................................................................................54 9. Annotation .......................................................................................................................59
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1. Introduction
The aim of this bachelor thesis is to define and describe the genre of the detective fiction and prove that detective fiction, especially its English branch, is a complex and fully-fledged genre with all the properties of a respectable literary genre. The detective fiction was for the long time considered as the lower style of literature. The works of this type were seen as not worth writing, neither worth reading but nevertheless, they were able to attract people´s attention and later also great popularity. At the beginning of the nineteenth century this opinion was very wide-spread but in spite of these attitudes there are stories containing the detection of a crime as their main story line.
In the first chapter of this thesis we would like to prove that the history of the detective fiction is much more complicated and longer as it may seem. The thesis will try to trace the origin of the first detective stories throughout the literary history and point out the most significant works of this genre. To establish the milestones in the detective literature would not be possible without the proper definition of the detective fiction genre and, therefore, the definition of the genre and the subgenres will be provided. The first chapter will also try to distinguish the British detective genre from the American genre. The comparison of these two types of detective literature will be based on the most significant distinctive elements of both styles, focusing mainly on the English detective fiction.
The following chapter will be describe in more detail the characteristic traces of the English detective fiction considering mostly the works written at the turn of the centuries, the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, and the period between the World War I and World War II. This era of the detective literature is known as the Golden Age of detective fiction. The analysis of the particular elements of the English detective genre will be based on the samples from the novels and short stories of the chosen authors, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Dame Agatha Christie. Beside the figure of the Great detective the thesis will focus on the description of the fearless woman detective in the dangerous male world of criminals, the figure of the detective´s companion and his function in the story. Another examined element of English detective genre will be the position of the religion and the figure of the religious amateur detective and finally the setting of the stories that is very characteristic of the English detective genre.
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The last chapter will outline the trends in the adaptations of the Golden age detective stories with respect to the changes made to the character´s appearance and character traits. Further, the focus will be laid on the maintenance of time and place of the setting of the original stories. This chapter is will be accompanied by the pictures of the actors portraying the fictitious book characters on screen. The pictures will point out the differences between the earliest adaptations and the modern versions of the stories.
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2. Historical Development of the Detective Genre
Despite of the fact that the boom of detective fiction started in the nineteenth century, the origins of the modern detective novel can be traced back to the centuries Before Christ. In this period appeared the first stories of solving the crime of unknown criminals. These stories are noticeable since the first Biblical stories, where all acts against the moral code of the society are finally revealed and offenders punished.
2.1 From the Ancient Detective Literature to the Modern Detective Genre
One of the first tales concerning the detection of the criminal act is written in The Old Testament, in the book of Prophet Daniel. The story “Susanna and the Elders” tells the story of a woman falsely accused of adultery and executed for committing this crime against God. “The story exposes the folly of assessing the truth of witnesses' testimony on the basis of their rank and reputation.”1Following the fact that the witnesses are at the same time her judges, young prophet Daniel intervenes into the process and reveals the inaccuracies in their testimonies. This tale contains the marks of a modern detective story represented by an individual interested in the destiny of innocent humans. By thorough investigation, analytic approach and final presentation of all collected facts in front of the audience, Daniel reveals the truth.
Proceeding in time, located approximately in the eight century After Christ, another collection of stories bearing marks of detective genre was written, the Arabic tales One Thousand and One Nights. From all the tales, “The Three Apples” is the best example. The tale begins with finding a chest containing a corpse of an unknown woman. Caliph Harun al-Rashid orders one of his viziers to find the killer within three days. The tangled story with unexpected plot twists is, at the beginning, unsuccessful, but with the shortening of time leading to the punishment of the vizier, he unexpectedly finds the final key to the crime. Again, there can be found the figure of a higher authority demanding the punishment of the murderer and the man ordered to collect the clues, to find the witnesses, and finally to untangle the mystery. These are undoubtedly the traces of the detective genre.
1 Lasine, Solomon, Daniel, and the Detective Story: The Social Functions of a Literary Genre, 257.
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Based on the publications of literary historians, there is another famous work from the sixteenth century, which bears the traces of detective investigation. The Tragedy of Hamlet by William Shakespeare, according to the literary theorists, has beside the revenge story also the detective story. Hamlet´s revenge is postponed and the proper detective work comes to the forefront. “Hamlet accepts his filial obligation, but before killing Claudius he takes the precaution of first proving his uncle’s guilt, and his investigations.”2 The detective in this play is young Prince Hamlet who tries to accuse his uncle Claudius of murder of Prince´s father and King Hamlet. The aim of his investigation is to bring the real criminal to justice and relieve the soul of his dead father. Whether this story can be expressly denoted as a predecessor of modern detective fiction is disputable.
Other disputable works from the eighteenth century are the collections of the French barrister François Gayot de Pitaval (1675–1743). The collection named Causes célèbres et intéressantes, avec les jugements qui les ont décidées recueillies par Mr. Gayot de Pitaval, avocat au Parlement de Paris published in around 1740, is by some critics marked as one of the milestones in development of detective genre. There are, however, some discrepancies pointing against this statement. The Causes celebres do not represent stories of investigation of an individual and they are not fictional. These are records of real crime cases from France written down by Mr Pitaval. Despite the existence of the word pitaval, appearing in Central Europe used to describe a person solving crimes or a collection of criminal stories, the French collections cannot be unanimously described and specified as examples of detective fiction. Supporting the argument, one can say that the proper description of crime in the initial part and following description of investigation in the second part fulfils the criteria for the detective genre. The emphasis is put on the story of crime and not on the detective; this trend is visible in later detective works.
One of the first authors of detective genre, writing the stories with the detective as a main character and the investigation of crime as a plot is Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). In 1841, a century after François Gayot de Pitaval, Poe published his first true detective short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” where he introduces the figure of the genius male detective C. Auguste Dupin. The story begins with the double murder in an inaccessible locked room on the fourth floor, which enables the murderer to get in from neither outside
2 Scaggs, Crime Fction, 12.
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of the building, nor from the insight. The murder of the mother and her daughter is without an apparent motif. An unprofessional eccentric detective Dupin decided to solve the crime not for the monetary reward, not because the police had ordered him; he investigates the murders for his amusement and desire to find the real murderer.
Poe established the conventions for writing detective literature. The first one is the figure of the great detective. He solves the mystery by thorough observation of the crime scene, collects all the relevant information about the victim and performs the profound analysis. This method is described as ratiocination and Poe himself, therefore, called his stories the tales of ratiocination. The second important aspect established by Poe´ s short story is the nameless narrator. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, the close friend of Dupin presents the story to the reader, describes the investigation and compares Dupin´s deductive method to the game.
“Let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometime indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.”3
This extract from the story demonstrates the purely intellectual engagement without any divine insights. Dupin´s investigation is based on intuition, observation and rationality. The last aspect creating a frame for later detective stories is the final revelation of the culprit followed by the presentation of collected facts and information leading to the real criminal. August Dupin appeared altogether in three detective short stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and in the mystery of “The Purloined Letter”. This eccentric man C. Auguste Dupin whose characteristic live style, unusual way of thinking and his omnipresent companion became a prototype for later great detective and his assistant. Poe´s contribution to the genre of detective fiction is, therefore, the most
3 Poe, The Complete Stories, 474.
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significant and can be marked by right as the first milestone in the development of the classic detective fiction.
While Poe called for the shorter form of fiction, French novelist Émile Gaboriau (1832-1873) wrote the first full-length detective novel. He prolonged the form of the detective story and twenty-five years after Poe´s publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” considered the detective story as a complex work, with its psychology and descriptions, not only of crime but also of characters and their thinking. This step towards nowadays-popular form of detective stories was not a very popular decision. Josef Škvorecký in his work described the elements of prose in short story as “elements distracting the attention from the real problem, tempting the author to mouthiness, longwindedness, emotionalism and the form of novel is considered almost a degeneration of the short story.”4 On the contrary, the longer form enabled Gaboriau to pay attention to the development of characters but at the same writing a detective novel demanded more craftsmanship and persistence in preserving the tension in the story and attention of the reader.
Gaboriau created two memorable detectives. The first one was an amateur detective Mister Tabaret, whose nickname was Père Tireauclair. He represents the figure of the great detective who leaves all the manual work to the assistant. His method is therefore called an “‘armchair detection’, in which the detective (normally an amateur detective, rather than a professional) solves a crime through a process of logical deduction, or ratiocination, from the evidence that is presented to him or her by others.”5 The second amateur detective, whose character was more developed and who appeared in numerous Gaboriau´s novels, was Monsieur Lecoq. Tabaret together with Lecoq appeared for the first time in the 1866 novel L’Affaire Lerouge. Lecoq represented an amateur detective and a prospective police officer of the French Sûreté. The figure of Lecoq was based on the historical police officer Eugène François Vidocq. As a former criminal who became the first director of La Sûreté Nationale and one of the first civil police forces in the field of criminal investigations in the world, Vidocq had the knowledge of the criminal forces and knew how to locate them.
4 Škvorecký, Nápady čtenáře detektivek, 35. 5 Scaggs, Crime Fiction, 20.
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