Birth of the Horror and Detective Story

The detective story is the ancestor of the Gothic novel, created by Englishman Horace Walpole. Castle of Otranto (1765) is considered, along with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), the foundation of the horror story.

The first detective stories are attributed to Frenchman Francois-Eugene Vidocq and American Edgar Allan Poe. Vidocq published his Memoirs in 1828, which chronicled his life as a detective, spy, soldier, and adventurer. The notoriety of his life was the inspiration of many writers: Dickens, Hugo, and Poe among others.

Poe, in five stories between 1840 and 1845, created the prin­ciples of the modern detective story. The first, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe introduces his super sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. He is eccentric, brilliant and the model for many detectives in the future, none more than the celebrated Sher­lock Holmes, the private detective created by Dr. Arthur C. Doyle.

Poe laid down three rules for the detective story: (1) preserve the mystery until the proper moment of denouement, (2) everything should convert on the denouement, (3) no undue or inartistic means should be employed to conceal the secret of the plot.

Where Poe in "Rue Morgue" introduced three common detective motifs: the wrongly suspected man, the crime in the sealed room, and the solution by unexpected means. Allan Pinkerton (The Expressman and the Detective, 1875) helped define the hero of the detective story by describing him as ". . . one of the order . . .hardy, tough, and capable of laboring in season and out . . ."

Doyle's character, Sherlock Holmes, may be the most famous character in all of fiction. Study in Scarlet (1887) introduced the narrator Dr. John Watson and the brilliant, eccentric detective Sherlock Holmes. Comparisons of Dupin and Holmes are obvious: both eccentric in manner, brilliant men who pursued their cases by following deduction and logic. Doyle cut Poe's affinity for elaborate introduc­tions, used lively, terse dialogue and accentuated the solving of a crime by analyzing trifling details and clues.

One of the finest (the finest according to Argentine writer Jorge Borges) detective novelists is G.K. Chesterton (The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911) whose Father Brown stories used a priest to solve mysteries where all the evidence is clearly presented the same time for the detective as it is the reader.

By the beginning of the twentieth century two styles were es­tablished: the detective story and the mystery story. The detective story used a logical solution of a problem, by a detective, who reads the clues of a crime the same time the reader does. The mystery story entails a strange or frighten­ing adventure where a protagonist is relentlessly pursued by an unknown menace.

The most influential detective writer, Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, 1930, The Thin Man, 1934) established tough-talk criteria. Hammett's early work has sentences with an average length of thirteen words; 77% mono-syllabic with 2% not Anglo-Saxon [Dashiell Hammett, W. Marling, G.K. Hall, 1983]. Hammett uses the first person narrative, the passive voice, and short clauses to create his terse, tough style.

Hammett in The Thin Man, and subsequent tales, has his detec­tive drawn into a case by the curiosity of a vivacious woman, Nora. Nick and Nora Charles attack their cases together.

Woody Allen, in his classic parody of Chandler and Hammett ("Mr. Big" - Getting Even, Random House, October, 1973), uses the same technique of a beautiful woman drawing the investigator into a case.

By the twentieth century the super-sleuth of the detective story was modeled from a variety of sources - one being the dime cowboy novel hero who was a "self-reliant, two-gun man who behaved in almost exactly the same fashion whether he were outlaw or peace officer. Eventually he was transformed into a detective and ceased in any significant sense to be Western." [Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, N.Y., 1960, p. 476]. From there the cowboy "adapted to life on the city streets the embodiment of innocence moving untouched through universal guilt . . . honest proletarian, illuminating the decadent society of the rich." [Ibid.]

From the brutal realism and idiomatic style of Hammett came the works and heroes of Raymond Chandler (Phillip Marlow), Ross MacDonald (Travis McGee), Agatha Christie (Poirot and Marple), John Dickinson Carr, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh. The heroes of Hammett and others are decent and tough. They share a common goal of solving criminal activity that often comes from the rich and powerful. The rich, with few scruples and little conscience, ruin the lives of common people. With post WWII literature, the sleuth hero is transformed into the spy hero of Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, and to a lesser degree John Le Carre. Here the heroes battle crimes of gigantic or­ganizations usually backed by super power countries.