Lecture on the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, from Monash University: http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/subjects/public_policy/pce2070/Lectures/GoldenLec.doc

This Lecture examines the 'Golden Age' of detective fiction, a time when publishing houses were expanding, popular fiction became more available through lending libraries and the public seemed to have a bottomless demand for variations on the 'crime as a puzzle' mystery stories featuring endless variations of amateur detectives.

During this time generic boundaries became well established and the detective story was confined to a set of formulaic rules that governed what had become a literary 'game' between author and reader.

At the same time criminology was seeking, as many academic fields of study did, to establish itself as a legitimate science and a field of professional endeavour. This scientific approach, known as positivism, changed the status of research and methodology and continues to be influential in criminology today.

With heavy urban growth and industrialisation, rates of crime continued to rise in the twentieth century. Looking both for answers and for folk demons to blame, the focus of attention shifted from the effectiveness of the criminal justice system to the nature of the criminal.

In criminology and in crime fiction there was an attempt to flesh out the two-dimensional criminal villains that had previously dominated discourse about crime - with very mixed results.

In the twentieth century the study of crime became more organised and subject to formal academic inquiry.

Early criminologists adopted biological science as a foundation for their knowledge although the attempt to find physical criminal 'types' was unscientific in practice and suspect in ideology. Elements of this approach continue in psychological or genetic theories of crime today, albeit with more orthodox scientific foundations for their assertions (although just as susceptible to ideological challenge).

The Golden Age of detective fiction mirrored this interest in criminal 'types'.

While the detective remained firmly stuck in the mould of Sherlock Holmes, the variety of crimes, methods and motives were extensive, albeit firmly rooted in middle class crime. These stories can be seen as an attempt to balance literary and psychological explanations for crime - a critical examination of the contention that crime is a purely moral phenomenon. For the first time the criminals become fully-fledged characters (within the confines of an author's ability), often presenting themselves as sympathetic figures to the reader.

The rules of the 'whodunnit' structure also leant itself to this expansion of the offender's character as the murderer needed to be a main character and could not be identified as such until the very end.

The demands of the genre required that the killer be unexpected. One way to do this would be to invoke the reader's sympathy from early on. Most famously in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd where the villain is, in fact, the narrator.

Crime fiction in these years was certainly not representative of the rates and types of crime committed in society, being unduly focussed on murder and middle-class offenders. Previously, crime fiction had a variety of crimes in mind, often theft, with murder being a rare occurrence. In the Golden Age, murder became compulsory and so ubiquitous that people may have been mislead as to how low the rates of murder actually were.

This is a theme which becomes important again when we examine serial killer stories. Public fascination in a type of crime along with a media emphasis on in (because of its dramatic storytelling potential) can create an unrealistic image of crime.

This situation is further entrenched when it is endorsed by authorities - both politicians and the police - seeking political profit from the fear-inducing effects.

The fear creating effects of crime fiction, along with the neat endings of the detective story has often led to the genre being condemned as conservative. Why? Certainly detective fiction was a favourite of the middle class, particularly women which may have also had much to do with the demographic breakdown of the fiction-reading public in general.

W. H. Auden claimed that the detective story had replaced religion as the source of certainty and stability in society. Murder was the only crime Important enough to fuel this pseudo-spiritual ritual. (Auden W. H. (1962) 'The Guilty Vicarage' in The Dyer's Hand and other Essays, Random House: New York).

Crime stories were moving toward a more detailed understanding of criminality, beyond the sneering villain in a black cloak of melodramas. Non-genre fiction had already embraced this kind of approach in stories such as Dostoyevsky'sCrime and Punishment or Dicken's work. In Crime and Punishment the protagonist, the student Raskolnikov murders an old woman but the reader is brought into a position of sympathy with him as a consequience of his poverty and his taken carefully through his rationale for committing the crime. She presented as a useless figure in society. Crime and Punbishment has been hailed as one of the first great crime stories but it is perhaps more properly seen as a psychological thriller and self-realization, also a study in the power of guilt which follows on full understanding. Charles Dickens' villain, Bill Sykes, in Oliver Twist is a vicious and brutal man but a product of his limited horizons and circumstances.

Crime fiction, however, was limited by the 'detective fiction' formula that required exposure of the criminal offender and was, because of this, condemned to remain conservative in Outlook. Rather than reflecting on the harsh nature of urban surroundings, poverty or injustice the machinery of classical crime fiction acted to reinstate the natural order of things rather than to challenge.

Criminology in that era was unsophisticated but its desire to find the nature of the criminal laid the groundwork for the scientific and objective approach that continues today. This approach accounted for the acceptance of criminology as a legitimate form of knowledge but also obscured some of its non-scientific practices and foundations in ways which were to remain hidden for years to come.

Influence of Positivism in Criminology

Involved a move from studying the philosophy of punishment to a study of the causes of crime per se.

It invokes scientific conventions in order to establish legitimacy as a science or pseudo-science.

In seeking the causes of crime, beyond the moral choice of the offender, it involved the study of intrinsic factors peculiar to the criminal rather than examining the social context.

Biological positivism sought to find some physical cause of criminality. Evolutionary theory interbred with early Fascist sentiment to create a belief in 'atavism' that some human beings were throwbacks to primitive ancestors. Atavism predicated on a chain of evolutionary descent, of evolved and 'less evolved' types.

Criminologists such as Lombroso (later favoured by Mussolini) studied prisoners in order to categorise their atavistic features (profiles, phrenology, even tattoos) justifying such work as 'scientific'.

Even today some remnant elements of this thinking srill exist, searching for the so-called 'criminal gene'.

Later positivists sought to understand criminology by examining

psychological factors, whether inherent or shaped by environment.

The scientific approach would become embraced by the social-scientific approach of later criminologists

Can an area of knowledge that seeks a certain outcome (i.e. the prevention of crime) be scientific? Or does this objective-based approach cloud the objectivity of those who want to see themselves as scientists? Those who should be dispassionately examining phenomena.

In order to understand why criminology was so eager to establish its credentials as a science, it is important to acknowledge the impact of science on twentieth century thought To be 'scientific' was to tie oneself to a series of institutions which upheld enlightenment promises of advancement towards a goal of advancing civlisation based on technological development. Even non-technological areas of inquiry were pressured to become more 'scientific' in their reasoning or at least the outward trappings of their reasoning.

The Philosophy of Science

Science established its legitimacy in the period of the enlightenment out of the old discipline of 'natural philosophy'.

Its application in technology and industrialisation saw the advance of science as a supposed cure-all for society's problems.

There was an acceptance of the Newtonian view of the universe as a clockwork device. All that had to be done was to investigate it and better understand its workings, that is its 'laws' of motion.

Anything can be examined as a scientific model (and is therefore predictable), provided you can measure the starting conditions and your model is of sufficient complexity. Chaos theory (or'complexity') has, of course, challenged the traditional philosophy of science, even within the hard sciences.

Physical scientists might well dispute the ability of scientific method to analyse human behaviour and human phenomena such as crime.

Much of this hinges on what it means to be scientific.

Certainly social scientists seek to establish objectivity and professionalism like a science but do their methodologies allow for the use of scientific method?

A moot point. Quantification in sociology and history. Linguistic structuralism in the study of texts in literature. Some branches of structural anthropology.

The Philosophy of Social Science

The social sciences sought similar credibility to the physical sciences and attempted to create scientific principles for the study of human behaviour and social interaction. But, can the same principles used to study physical phenomena (chemistry, physics) be applied to human dynamics?

Can human behaviour be predicted by such methods? Is human behaviour determined by cause & effect? Can behaviour or attitudes be measured?

Can human behaviour be predicted?

Even if it can, are there moral concerns relating to the use of this information (e.g. predicting patterns of future criminality in certain 'under-privileged' communities).

From another perspective we may ask whether science can or should exist without the reference point of ethics or morality? These questions are often asked from a religious perspective. Can or should science be 'value-free'? How then does this effect social science?

Questions considered on a regular basis by the Ethics Committee of Monash University.

Does 'free will' exist or are we the sum total of our biogenetic nature plus outside influences?

While these developments occurred in academic fields and in the discourse of ideas, the genre of detective fiction proceeded along a different path. It sought to entertain first and to instruct and edify second. It became very popular and therefore profitable.

Because of the commercial interests involved, publishers became reluctant to depart from the models offered by previous successes so that very formal generic rules evolved, governing what was acceptable and what was not. It was in this way that the genre itself came into being and the Golden Age 'whodunnits' came to be recognised as conforming to a type.

In the crime fiction of the Golden Age novels and stories the detective still occupied the centre stage, but it was a different detective from the authoritarian male masterminds of the Dupin and Sherlock Holmes variants of the classical school.

While some of these detectives espoused scientific methods or approaches (especially in logic) and others had separate careers such as doctors, few actually used a strictly 'scientific' approach to detection, aside from some logical induction (not deduction). One exception was R. Austin Freeman's Dr Thorndyke who used a medical forensic approach but many readers found him dull as a result.

What seemed to be important to readers was the illusion of science or the image of science. As with space travel, we can marvel at the physics and the mathematics without actually having to understand them.

One scientific principle that seemed to be important was that of cause and effect.

Violence seldom erupted out of illogical circumstances and was usually part of a carefully planned revenge scheme. The pattern of human motivation could be complex and puzzling but it could always be uncovered and revealed by assiduous detective work, with punishment and a return to the natural order a logical consequence. This can be contrasted to the fiction of Dostoyevsky or later the work of existentialist or absurdist writers such as Sartre or Camus.

The neatness of the violence in a Golden Age puzzle provided closure that could never be achieved with the senselessness of the violence in books like Albert Camus' famous 1942 short novel The Outsider. This was perhaps another reason why detective stories were seen as being confined to genre stories, mere entertainments and not 'real literature' that pushed forward the boundaries of understanding and challenged the accepted order of things.

Causation was (and still is) a major assumption within criminology, which searches for causes of crime, be they located in a person's biology, psychology or as the result of external forces.

Some scientists have been wary of the notion of causation from as early as David Hume and through to modern chaos theorists. Just because we observe a cause and then an effect does not mean that they are linked, anywhere except in our perceptions. Violence in a fictional world (expressly fictional or that of the criminological imagination) is always neater than the violence that appears to us as 'senseless' violence.

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction

The 'Golden Age' refers to the period between world wars one and two, roughly 1919 to 1939. It is reflective of a period in which Britain was still an imperial power of consequence and perceived itself as a world leader following the humiliating terms imposed upon the Germans at the conclusion of the 1914-18 war. Just as Britain saw itself as a commercial and military power, so too was it a cultural power. English standards, entertainments, accepted truths and ways of doing things were influential, especially in Anglophobe post-colonial countries like Australia. In this context English fiction and English film were popular commercial entertainments.

The focus of crime fiction moved from short stories to crime novels, particularly 'detective fiction'.

The conventions of detective fiction were established along with a growing sense of professionalism among the writers themselves. This

lead to an increase in popularity but also an explosion in mundane writing as the writers were encouraged to 'churn them out' for a consuming public.

Detection is a scientific process of investigation.

Piecing together clues (observation) and testing theories (hypothesis).

A scientific approach was not new. Conan Doyle invoked the scientific rationalist model of criminality.

In 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' atavism is used as an explanation for criminal wrongdoing, a throwback to a former evolutionary type. Doyle had a number of odd bees in his bonnet. He was an ardent advocate of spiritualism as well.

Forensic science had become established by the Golden Age and was a great source of public fascination. The act of readership was to be a participant in the solution of a puzzle, in the forensic act. Important that this not be too complicated, toio technical or too overly scientific. Agatha Christie's detective Hercule Poirot is a clever man but humble an unassuming and he does most of his work by close observation and piecing together things in ways that the reader can, eventually, appreciate. He does not dazzle with scientific or technical brilliance or know-how.

The certainties of the setting (rural or village England), the protagonists (well-to-do English) the solution and the triumph of virtue were escapist and a comfort to those living in uncertain times. If we Australians speak of Don Bradman, the cricketer, providing a symbol of certainty and a daydreaming escape in the harsh years of the Depression then so, too, did the detective fantasy novels of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and their kind.

Careers for Amateur Detectives

The generic rules governing golden age stories did not allow the central character to develop too far from the model established by Dupin and Holmes and developed by popular golden age writers. One thing that was allowed to be innovative (often becoming a gimmick) was the career that the detective engaged in when not solving crimes. These include:

Doctor (trained in scientific temperament and diagnosis)

priest, nun or rabbi (a captive audience among the faithful)

gentlemen of leisure (often wealthy dilettantes, Lord Peter Wimsey)

professors or other academics (typically absent-minded)

lawyers (good for the courtroom drama)

novelists (often crime writers themselves)

retired police (old habits die hard)

Often the novelty of a book hinged entirely on the profession of the detective. At times this was ridiculous. "Arnold Mothberger is a Manchester vet with a lazy eye, an amusing lisp, an enthusiasm for model aeroplanes and a crime-finding pig". With the 'whodunnit' formula sacred the personality of the sleuth could take on bizarre personations and cross the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Rex Stout's sleuth Nero Wolfe weighs nineteen stone, never goes out (well, rarely), is an avid collector of orchids, has featured ikn around fifty adventures, has an assistant who drinks milk, has a personal chef, and a valet who tends his collection of 300 orchids on top of an old brownstone house in New York.

Amateurs vs Police

One element established by Poe and Doyle which became popular in the golden age was the amateur status of the detective and the corresponding incompetence of the police. While there have always been exceptions to this rule, and there have always been a handful of fictional police detectives, they were a minority until the rise of the 'police procedural'.

Poe's Dupin claimed that police were 'too cunning to be profound'. Sherlock Holmes dismissed police procedures (including fingerprinting!) to be the dull plodding work of administrators unable to make the leaps of brilliance required to solve crimes.

Throughout the Golden Age of detective fiction the police represent the dimwitted state bureaucracy who are unable to see the forest for the trees, routinely seizing the obvious suspect who the detective must exonerate in the search for the true criminal. Invariable the police provide an essential complicating ingredient in the plot, as critical to the genre and predictable as the role of chorus in Greek tragedy.

This seems a little puzzling considering it is the police force who routinely come into contact with crime and criminals and may be expected to develop the skills of dealing with and apprehending them.

However, the romantic idea of the upper to middle-class detective was at odds with the reality of the lower-class police officer. That is, until a new type of crime story came into being.

Throughout their history, police departments have been dogged with or easily tagged with corruption. The fact of their being lowly remunerated did not exactly make for a glamorous or independent sleuth. As such in Golden Age crime fiction they made better low-grade antagonists than fully-fledged professional protagonists. Even when the police procedural became standard it seemed that the heroic police character was often contrasted against the bureaucratically inept or outright corrupt police administration.

Ideology and Crime Fiction

What doe we mean by ideology in fiction, or life for matter. Typically, we are talking about a worldview, a range of assumptions about the world. About right and wrong and the desired state of things. People of a similar class and upbringing often share the same values, or ideology. We think about ideology in fairly simplistic or dualistic terms, radical or conservative, but these are often tags for often quite complex patterns of belief and assumption.

It can often be difficult to pin down the ideology of detective fiction but it is an important concept with different genres and often with different writers within a genre. The critic Stephen Knight makes a great deal of it in his influential bookForm and Ideology in Crime Fiction.

We begin to see the difference in ideology between the writers of the Golden Age and the 'hardboiled' American school and again with the Feminist writers of more recent times. Often a writer can reflect on values by placing certain characters in a context, in choosing which chracaters they may be a woman rather than a man, for example.

Ideology is itself a radical, even a Marxist concept. For the radical perspective the defence of the status quo is a questionable project, no matter how misguided the 'criminal' protagonist may be. On the other hand it is appealing to conservative instincts to see disorder contained and polite bourgeois sensibility to triumph through the action of the heroic or clever individual.

On the other hand the subversive thrills of detective fiction require a disruption to occur in the first place and for exciting transgressions to occur. This tension is suspense and akin to sexual tension. In an age much more puritanical than our own detective fiction may have involved some form of release in this respect. This tension continues as the detective breaks rules and obtains justice in the face of the odds and reactionary State police authority. The triumph is that of the individual, the detective, but the intervention acts basically to see the wrongdoer identified and punished (often the villain punishes him or herself, by suicide) and the natural order either reinstated or reinforced.

At best this is a mixed bag and a good example of the problem of trying to define the ideology of a text in a simple unilateral manner. The morality play and the metaphor, if there is one, is about challenge and conspiracy. Every subversive act contains the endorsement of the order that is being disrupted, every neat conclusion contains the potential for further upheaval.

Beating off the challenge, the conspiracy, the threat, the subversion is the business of detection. Considered at this level crime fiction of this ilk is the panaroid 's playground, an environment neatly sequestered away from reality but allowing real fears to be projected on to it with cathartic and pleasurable consequence upon release, that is closure.

The Rules of the Detection Club

The Golden Age detective stories became very popular and therefore very profitable for publishers. As this occurred, the traditional story structure and format became a rigid set of rules as to what was acceptable or not acceptable. In part this was due to publisher's control over writers, seeking to reproduce a winning formula. In part this came from the demands of the audience that wanted its enjoyment of violence contained within safe rules of structure and approach.

Some of the most remembered books of the Golden Age were those which defied the rules, such as Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which caused critical outrage at what was seen as a flagrant disregard for the rules. Ultimately it was these constraints that saw the genre subjected to critique and even ridicule, run out of creative steam and descend into cycles of literary cannibalism and self-parody of which the public eventually grew tired.

These rules of the Detection Club are paraphrased from the initiation ceremony of 1932 (somewhat tongue in cheek):

Detectives must detect crime using their wits, not by making use of divine revelation, feminine intuition, mumbo jumbo, jiggery pokery, coincidence or act of God.

The writer should never conceal a vital clue from the reader.

The following should be used in 'seemly moderation': gangs, conspiracies, death rays, ghosts, hypnotism, trap doors, chinamen, super-criminals and lunatics.

The writer must utterly and forever forswear Mysterious Poisons Unknown to Science.

The writer will honour the King's English.

The writer swears to be loyal to the Club, neither purloining nor disclosing any plot or secret communicated before publication by a member whether under the influence of drink or otherwise.

Agatha Christie

One of the great masters of the form - she used practically every permutation of the puzzle format (from 'they all did it'to 'the narrator did it' to the detective story 'with no detective' the now un-pc titled Ten Little Niggers.)

Still the best selling author of all time, with works translated into more languages than the bible. Working life spanned period just after WW!. She died in 1976. Biography of her by Janet Morgan.

Appealed to middle class readers, models of safe domesticity upset by criminal acts but ultimately restored to social order. Comforting morality fables. Ostensibly uses scientific or psychological methods of inquiry but, ultimately, crime seems to be a form of moral weakness (very much classical criminology). Tough-minded upper middle-class British attitudes. Giddens critiques this aspect of social discipline that industrial capitalism depends on.

Strong emphasis on time/space ordering. People belong in certain locations at certain times and any deviance is suspicious. Belief in a social hierarchy. Eccentricity, outsiders allowed (Hercule Poirot is an outsider, Miss Marple is an eccentric) but their purposer is not to challenge the accepted order. The Anglican Hymn:

The Rich Man at His Castle

The Poor Man at His gate

God made them high and Lowly

And ordered their estate

But Christie's own marginal status as a woman in a deeply gendered society. Writing for her the invention of a social role and the invention of work. Interesting feminist sub-texts in her work, in the depiction and invention of Poiot and Marple, for example, as opposed to the authoritarian male figures of Dupin and Holmes.

Interesting aspects to discuss:

The victim is often thoroughly unlikeable

The murderer often commits suicide or is given the opportunity to do so. Why do you think this is so?

Poirot vs Miss Marple

Poirot represents an emasculated version of the heroic male figure. He possesses the same analytical faculties ('the little grey cells') as Holmes but is represented as somewhat foolish and vain (foppish). He is Belgian. Interesting that the Belgians seen as heroes WW1 invaded by Germany 'Poor Little Belgium'.

Christie's dissatisfaction with heroic solutions. She grew to dislike her detective but readers demanded more of his stories.

Early Poirot explained the study of offenders motives as 'psychology' but he was no psychologist, rather limited to a form of general character observation. He observed that 'female intuition' is merely an

unconscious version of this form of observation. Poirot a feminised man?

Miss Marple was in many ways the antithesis of Poirot, written as a response to him. She was an integrated member of her community (not an outsider like Poirot) and solved crime with folk wisdom, an ordinary understanding of character. All motives resembled gossip from St Mary's

Mead, but at a different scale.

Marpie relies on gossip and 'domestic epistemology' solve crimes.

Miss Marple best reflected Christie's aim to locate the solution for crime within ordinary members of a cohesive, moral society while still teasing the reader with a challenging puzzle.

Crime Fiction as Literature?

Writers such as Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh sought to establish crime fiction as a credible form of literature in its own right, with mixed success.

Golden Age writers (such as Christie) wrote puzzle stories that depended on the crime puzzle for entertainment value. Characters were usually stereotypes and the narrative melodramatic.

Certainly the move toward 'literature' would have been in part due to the low status accorded to 'genre fiction'. Yet the success of the genre attracted attention from serious writers and critics, such as George Orwell and the poet W. H. Auden who wrote about it and confessed to a liking for it, admiring the skill and ingenuity of certain writers. The success of the genre demanded evaluation in popular cultural terms.

Other issues, questions and methodological approaches athat can help us evaluate the literary aspect of these works.

Can a piece of detective fiction stand alone, when you remove the detection aspect? How meaningful is the representation of social context and character?

Two quotes from the writers

'The mechanics of a detective story may be shamelessly contrived but the writing need not be'

Ngaio Marsh

'No kind of fiction can survive for very long cut off from the great interests of humanity and from the mainstream of contemporary literature. We can now handle the mechanical elements of the plot with ease of long practice; we have yet to discover the best way of combining these with the serious artistic treatment of the psychological elements..."

Dorothy L Sayers

Authors

Golden Age

Margery Allingham

EC Bently

GK Chesterron

Agatha Christie

R Austin Freeman

E.W. Hornung

Ngaio Marsh

Ellery Queen

Sax Rohmer

Dorothy L Sayers

Rex Stout

Edgar Wallace

Contemporary

Kerry Greenwood

PD James

Ellis Peters

Ruth Rendell

Further Reading

Umbert Eco on Roger Ackroyd Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

— Adapted from Monash University course materials (Public Policy and Cultural Studies).