Watching the Detectives

Since childhood, I have been a sucker for detective stories. I remember the excitement of the Sherlock Holmes stories when I first read them in an extended period of absence from primary school due to yet another bronchial illness. In my teens, I ran into Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, during a family holiday when, shall we say, relations were slightly strained between myself and my parents. These intricate puzzles were a welcome distraction from a rather difficult family atmosphere (all my fault, I hasten to add).

In adulthood, I have enjoyed stories with a wide range of detective protagonists, including:

·       Father Brown, the wise little priest in GK Chesterton’s short stories;

·       Doctor Fell, John Dickson Carr’s creation, a mountainous, overweight caricature of Chesterton himself;

·       Barlach, the Swiss detective dying of an incurable disease in Friedrich Durrenmatt’s very powerful novellas The Judge and His Hangman and The Quarry;

·       Ruth Galloway, the forensic archaeologist in Elly Griffiths’ Norfolk novels;

·       The likeable but unlikely Bombay policeman invented by HRF Keating, Inspector Ghote;

·       David Small, the astute young rabbi in Harry Kemelman’s series which began with Friday the Rabbi Slept Late;

·       Mrs Bradley, the Home Office forensic psychologist in Gladys Mitchell’s quirky novels;

·       Dr Quirke, the boozy pathologist in 1950’s Dublin, brilliantly conceived by John Banville, one of the few writers to win the double of a booker prize and a gold dagger for crime fiction.

The list could go on and on. There seem to be crime novels in almost every ethnicity and culture, and the detectives include cleaning ladies, peers and princes, down-at-heel private investigators of both sexes and all races, and police officers of all shapes, sizes and colours. In recent years, crime fiction has often focussed on back-room boys and girls, pathologists or forensic scientists like Quirke and Galloway in the list above.

The genre of crime fiction is immensely popular. As I understand it, Agatha Christie is the most successful writer of all time. What is the attraction? Chesterton opined that what are sometimes referred to as ‘blood and thunder’ books play to a primeval human instinct, with a biblical precedent, the blood of the innocent crying out to heaven for the thunder of retribution. However, my introductory remarks upstairs point to a more banal explanation: crime novels are great comfort food in difficult times, and afford an escape to a world where morality is more black and white, and where there is always a resolution at the end. Maybe the black and white morality links the two explanations.

A second question is what makes for successful detective fiction? My own feeling is that while plot, characterisation and the other basic ingredients for fiction in any genre are important, the one that matters most for a detective story is the atmosphere of intrigue. The weird, dysfunctional households of John Dickson Carr, in which you might imagine any of the characters is capable of murder, the rumour-ridden village life in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories, the interwoven cliques of the Irish establishment in the Quirke novels, all have this in spades.

Let me tell you about a couple of curiosities in the genre.

Murder Most English

Colin Watson was a journalist who wrote a series of novels set in a small English town called Flaxborough, almost certainly based on somewhere in Lincolnshire. The heroes are Detective Inspector Purbright and his assistant Detective Sergeant Sid Love. The novels abound in local detail and local character, and they usually have some scurrilous sexual content, adding to the atmosphere of intrigue cited above. An interesting incomer to Flaxborough is Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime, a con-artist who nevertheless ends up assisting Purbright in identifying the murderer in at least one of the novels, The Flaxborough Crab. The local detail is particularly important, as it adds to the escapism and comfort food aspect of the novels. It gives the reader a little world in which to live for a few hours.

Four of the novels were adapted for television with some style in the 1970’s, with Anton Rogers as Purbright, Christopher Timothy (who also played James Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small) as Sergeant Love, and Brenda Bruce as Miss Teatime. The television adaptations were very true to the local atmosphere, the little world.

Watson was conservative by instinct, but had a great eye for the foibles of British life at all levels. He also wrote an interesting treatise on the English detective novel, Snobbery with Violence. You might not agree with everything in it (particularly his comments on some of Orwell), but it is very perceptive.

One thing I particularly like about the novels is (despite the intrigue and the sexual shenanighans) the unsophisticated innocence. In one of the novels, Inspector Purbright sends DS Love off on an errand, and says, ‘Take the Bentley, but for God’s sake be careful where you park it. The police are bastards in this town.’

Rain Dogs

Another interesting example is the series of novels by Adrian McKinty, featuring an extremely unlikely protagonist, a Roman Catholic detective sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the 1980’s, Sean Duffy. Duffy is one of the modern school of fictional police officers, a young chino-wearing blade who does not regard himself as a moral superior to the population he polices, occasionally breaks the law himself (smokes dope) and strangely is probably more realistic but less believable to the standard crime novel readership.

One attraction of these novels is the social history dimension. Real people move in and out of the novels as characters, and there is some shameless hindsight- although set in the 20^th century, the novels were written in the 21^st.

A particularly interesting example is Rain Dogs. It includes fictitious encounters with Muhammad Ali, and, brilliantly conceived and very chilling, Jimmy Savile. The whodunit aspect I guessed, including the murderer and the way of escaping initial capture, largely thanks to the author’s citing one of John Dickson Carr’s novels which I had read many years ago.

The Hollow Man

And this brings me back full circle to the ‘golden age’ of the detective novel. John Dickson Carr was an American, but most of his fiction takes place in England and France. His works included several different detective protagonists, but his most famous is Doctor Fell, a huge, chuckling, avuncular devil, based on GK Chesterton. Carr’s novels obey the detective story rules very strictly, affording the reader the necessary clues, but are usually too cleverly plotted for the reader to guess the murderer.

The one thing they do possess is the atmosphere of intrigue which I keep banging on about. Two of the Doctor Fell novels, Death Watch and The Hollow Man, are set in the area around the British Museum in London, and brilliantly convey the air of mystery that surrounds that district at night. The Hollow Man in particular has great power, including a truly shocking secret past on the part of one of the apparent victims, snow and darkness obscuring the events in Bloomsbury. A claustrophobic household of suspects glare at each other in suspicion as the snow falls in the dark London streets outside.

From the sublime to the corblimey

Let us leave the printed page for a moment and think of the silver screen. The film Murder by Death, is an amusing curiosity, sending up the ‘body in the library’ motif, and featuring various caricatures of fictional detectives. The hard-boiled Sam Spade type is played with great comedic skill by Peter Falk, who was Colombo for so many years on the telly. The Sam Spade character is gloriously unreconstructed, racist, sexist and unconsciously hilarious. At one point, after he has just made the most outrageously racist remark directed at the Charlie Chan figure, he says by way of apology or explanation, ‘No offence, Slanty.’