P.D. James
The guilty party is the publishing department of Oxford's Bodleian Library. It was the department that suggested that P.D. James might like to write on British detective fiction in aid of the library. In her foreword to Talking about Detective Fiction, she comments with characteristic modesty that she "was relieved that the subject proposed was one of the few on which I felt competent to pontificate." As ever, she plays fair with the reader, stressing that the book includes much material familiar to those who have heard and read her views before.
She begins by defining her terms of reference. Detective fiction can be distinguished from other types of crime and mystery fiction by its "highly organized structure and recognized conventions." At its centre is the detective, generally a series character, either amateur or professional, charged with the investigation of a crime, usually murder, whose perpetrator is one of a limited number of suspects. The author must play fair with the reader, who must be given as much opportunity as the detective to deduce the identity of the murderer.
Detective fiction is often dismissed by critics on the grounds that its formulaic nature places undue restrictions on an author's creativity. James trounces the underlying assumption by pointing out that the creativity of poets appears to have flourished with the tight 14-line structure of the sonnet; whereas with Jane Austen's novels, we have Harlequin novels "written by a genius."
She deals briskly with the origins of the genre, tracing the usual antecedents in Dickens and in sensational novels such as William Godwin's Caleb Williams and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. It's interesting to consider whether the genre could have not come into being before there was an organized detective force. The concerns of detective fiction resonated with Victorian readers, who were obsessed with the real-life murder cases that threatened the stability of their ordered world.
Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown are granted a chapter to themselves. James speculates with characteristic wit about the practicalities of sharing the Baker Street rooms with the great detective and about such matters as Dr. Watson's bull pup, which vanishes mysteriously from the canon after one brief reference. ("Was the unfortunate puppy a victim of Sherlock Holmes' revolver practice?") Poe's influential Dupin stories are awarded an honourable mention, though some readers may feel they deserve more extensive coverage than they receive here.
The focus of attention moves to the genre's so-called Golden Age between the wars. James rightly stresses the influence of E.C. Bentley's wonderful Trent's Last Case, written tongue-in-cheek to sabotage the detective genre but ironically the precursor of one of its most enduring variants. She discusses the work of a selection of essentially second-division practitioners - including, rather oddly, Josephine Tey, whose constantly inventive and quietly experimental novels sit awkwardly in this company. She also looks at the role of women detectives.
The book's emphasis is mainly on British authors, but one chapter is devoted to Soft-centred and Hard-boiled Americans, notably Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald and Sara Paretsky. Their work illuminates, by contrast, the nature of British detective fiction.
James turns next to the four great Golden Age authors, the so-called Queens of Crime: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. As a bonus to modern readers, their books reveal a great deal about the vanished world in which their stories are set. James gives lukewarm credit to Christie the technician, but deplores the way Christie has overshadowed more interesting and influential authors. James writes with far more enthusiasm about Sayers, Allingham and Marsh.
Part of the pleasure of the book is that it offers an opportunity for the reader to play detective: to investigate P.D. James herself. Chapter 6 is particularly interesting because here she discusses setting, viewpoint and characterization, partly in relation to her own novels. This is followed by a fascinating analysis of the detective novel as a literary form. Is it ethically defensible? Can it be considered as anything more than a trivial amusement? Why does it appeal to so many people and on such a profound level? Why did Auden like it and Edmund Wilson read it only to sneer?
She ends with a survey of the current state of detective fiction. It has evolved since the Golden Age, but the format still exerts its old magic. At the heart of the story, there remains the detective hero, "like a secular priest expert in the extraction of confession, whose final revelation of the truth confers a vicarious absolution on all but the guilty." James holds that the genre continues to flourish because it is by its very nature reassuring, in that it offers the ultimate hope that we live in a "beneficent and moral universe." The book includes cartoons and a bibliography, but unfortunately lacks an index.
It is, of course, possible to cavil at some of the judgments and to regret some of the omissions and inclusions. But, as James makes clear from the start, this is a personal view of a particular area of the crime genre. She writes so wittily and with such authority that this lucid little book may well join the handful of classic essays on the genre, such as Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder or Sayers's magisterial introduction to Great Short Stories of Detection and Mystery.
In sum, the Bodleian Library was fortunate she agreed to its proposal. And so are we.
Andrew Taylor won the 2009 Crime Writers' Association's Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in crime writing. He is also the Spectator's crime fiction reviewer. His website is www.andrew-taylor.co.uk.