What Is a Detective Story? A Puzzle With Rules the Reader Can Check
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
The form has a structural feature almost no other fiction has: the reader is invited to compete with the text. A detective story presents the same information to the reader as to the investigator, promises that the solution follows from it, and is judged partly on whether a reader could have worked it out and did not. That contract produced a body of explicit rules in the 1920s, a period of extraordinary formal ingenuity, and a reaction against the whole arrangement that produced the other half of the genre.
Poe and the template
Edgar Allan Poe published The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 and in three short stories established almost the entire apparatus. C. Auguste Dupin is an eccentric amateur of formidable intellect who solves crimes by reasoning from physical evidence, accompanied by an unnamed admiring narrator of ordinary intelligence through whose eyes the reader watches; the official police are competent, conventional and wrong; the solution is delivered as an explanation at the end; and the first case is a locked room mystery. Every element of that recurs for the next century and a half. Wilkie Collins and Dickens developed the material at novel length in the 1860s, and Arthur Conan Doyle, who acknowledged Poe directly, made it a mass form from 1887 with a detective whose method of reasoning from small physical observations was modelled on a surgeon Doyle had studied under, and with the short story format serialised in a magazine, which is the commercial arrangement that built the audience.
The rules
Between the wars, when the puzzle form was at its most formally rigorous, writers set down explicit codes. S. S. Van Dine published twenty rules in 1928 and Ronald Knox published a decalogue the following year, and the Detection Club, whose members included Christie, Sayers and Chesterton, had an initiation oath along the same lines:
- •The criminal must be someone mentioned early in the story and must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has followed
- •All clues must be presented to the reader plainly, with nothing withheld that the detective knows
- •No supernatural agency, no undiscovered poisons, no accident and no unaccountable intuition
- •No more than one secret passage or hidden room, and no twin brothers or doubles unless prepared for
- •The detective must not commit the crime, and the servants must not be the culprit, which is a rule about class as much as about plotting
- •There must be a corpse, and the motive must be personal
- •Several of the finest novels of the period are famous precisely for breaking one of these in a way that proves the rule, which is how at least two of Christie's most discussed books work
The other half of the genre
The reaction against the puzzle came from America in the 1920s and 1930s. Dashiell Hammett, who had worked as a Pinkerton operative, and then Raymond Chandler, wrote crime in which the interest is not who did it but what the investigation reveals about a corrupt society, in which the detective is a professional with a code rather than an amateur with a hobby, in which violence is frequent and consequential, and in which the prose style is a substantial part of the point. Chandler's essay The Simple Art of Murder in 1944 attacked the English puzzle novel directly as artificial, describing Hammett as giving murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons rather than to provide a corpse. The hard-boiled line runs through noir fiction and film into the modern police procedural, which takes the professional investigation seriously as institutional work rather than as individual brilliance, and which is now the dominant form on television everywhere.
Why the form is so durable
Detective fiction has been the best-selling fiction category for most of a century, and several explanations have been offered. Structurally it offers a guaranteed shape, with disorder introduced and resolved, which W. H. Auden analysed in an essay comparing the form to a fantasy of restored innocence in which guilt is located in one person and removed. It offers intellectual engagement of a kind few other popular forms do, since the reader is working. It licenses the examination of a society from top to bottom, because a murder investigation is one of the few plots that plausibly takes a protagonist into every social setting, which is why the genre has been used so effectively for social criticism by Scandinavian writers, by Walter Mosley on race in Los Angeles and by countless regional series whose actual subject is a place. And it is enormously adaptable, absorbing the police procedural, the legal thriller, the forensic novel, the historical mystery and the cosy village variant without losing the central contract.
The takeaway
Detective fiction is unusual in inviting the reader to compete with the text, promising that the solution follows from information the reader has been given, which is the contract the interwar rule codes tried to formalise. Poe established the apparatus in 1841 with an eccentric reasoner, an ordinary narrator, baffled police and a locked room. The American hard-boiled tradition rejected the puzzle in favour of what an investigation reveals about a corrupt society, and the form survives because it guarantees a shape, engages the reader actively and can take a protagonist anywhere.