the Mason-HANAUD combination: the wealth of atmosphere, the effortless
portrayal of character, the brooding sense of evil, the mordant and
brilliant humor. But whichever title we choose, it will be amply evident
that Mason was the first writer after Collins to make significant use of
the psychological element in the detective story. Like R Austin Freeman
whom he resembles in no other respect—he was far ahead of his time.
AEW
Mason is still writing to-day, at well past seventy. It is surely
permissible to hope for at least one more of the matchless HANAUD tales
before he chooses to lay down his pen. It would be both impractical and
unnecessary in a volume of the present scope and purpose to go into any
detail concerning the career or the multitudinous and varied works of
Gilbert K Chesterton (1874-1936), one of the genuinely distinguished
English men-of-Ietters of this century. Our interest here is confined to
only one of his many phases, but one that for its protagonist may
possibly outlive his more pretentious and "serious" writings.
Chesterton's love of paradox is too well known to require comment. He
must have delighted in the fact that by the creation of his erstwhile
meek, round-faced priest-detective, FATHER BROWN, he gave body to one of
the most famous and best loved of detective characters —while writing
tales that often are not detective stories at all!
The FATHER BROWN series is composed exclusively of short stories, of
which there are fifty, collected in five volumes: The Innocence of
Father Brown (1911), The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), The Incredulity
of Father Brown (1926), and The Secret of Father Brown (1927), and the
belated and definitely inferior The Scandal of Father Brown (1935).
Chesterton also created two lesser quasi-detectives: HORNE FISHER of The
Man Who Knew Too Much* (1922) and MR. POND of The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond
(1936). Both imitated the BROWN formula, but neither one equaled or
amplified it in any significant way.
The" best BROWN stories, from a detectival standpoint, are found in the
first two volumes. In the final three the artificiality and fantasticism
that tinge all the tales to a certain extent are even more pronounced.
To say that FATHER BROWN is the greatest of "intuitive" detectives is to
suggest by the same word the most serious failure of his adventures by
deductive standards: for deduction, not instinct, is the root of all
convincing criminal investigation. Chesterton partly circumvented the
difficulty by explaining (a trifle too frequently and insistently) that
BROWN'S magician-like ability to produce full-fledged solutions out of
his globular head was only the logical operation of his profound
knowledge of human wickedness, acquired in his priestly calling. Many
critics have objected also to the backgrounds of the stories. Far from
meeting the verisimilitude test of plausible fictive detection, they are
often too abstruse to carry conviction even as fantasy (which also needs
some connecting link with reality to achieve its purpose). Nevertheless,
there are numerous points in the little priest's favor, as detective as
well as man of wisdom. And Chesterton's vivid imag-
* Related only by title to the remarkable Alfred
Hitchcock film-melodrama of the same name.ination, on the
occasions when he kept it within the range of plausibility, greatly
enriched and revivified the stereotyped form into which the detective
story was beginning to fall when he started writing.
Nearly all the problems in the BROWN stories are problems of character.
But Chesterton's approach was philosophical, where A. E. W. Mason's (for
example) was psychological. As Willard Huntington Wright points out,
FATHER BROWN is chiefly concerned with the moral and religious aspects
of crime. In fact, it may well be Chesterton's chief contribution to the
genre that he perfected the metaphysical detective story. Though not
particularly suited to the metier, and for that reason seldom found in
its pure state among other writers of detection, influential traces of
it are present in the works of many of the better Moderns. A few of the
individual stories are undeniably brilliant, whether judged as detective
tales or as that problematical thing called Art. Chesterton is at his
best when he states a problem in apparently supernatural terms and then
resolves it by philosophical paradox—see such tales as "The Hammer of
God," "The Invisible Man," and that anthologists' favorite, "The Queer
Feet." Unfortunately, the explanations are sometimes as fantastic as the
premises, and too frequently the author seizes the occasion to intrude
personal dogma and mysticism.
But such faults are largely forgivable in the light of the greater
achievement. When Chesterton began to write the FATHER BROWN narratives,
the detective story had only two main classifications: increasingly
heavy-handed romanticism on the one side, and the new scientificism on
the other. (Mason, it is true, had re-introduced the
element of psychology, but he did not follow it up until well after the
War.) Chesterton's brilliant style and fertile imagination brought new
blood to the genre; gave it a needed and distinctly more "literary" turn
that was to have far-reaching effect. His great reputation and the
instant response to FATHER BROWN as a character combined to create an
aura of prestige and respectability which detective fiction at the time
was beginning to require it was to survive and progress.
Too many of Chesterton's tales will not meet the full test of good
detection, but he can not be lightly dismissed. He belongs definitely
among the important innovators. The next significant English name, in
any chronological consideration of the post-Doyle years, is that of EC
Bentley, whose epoch-making novel, Trent's Last Case, appeared in 1913.
Detailed discussion of this author and book are reserved to a later
chapter, however, for reasons which will appear at that point. Suffice
it to say here that though Freeman and Mason and Chesterton were ahead
of their time, they were logically enough precursors; but Bentley,
despite his dates, definitely belongs to a later period, the era we call
Modern.
The last important English author of the HOLMES period proper (which may
be said, approximately, to have ended with Sarajevo) is Ernest Bramah,
whose blind detective MAX CARRADOS appeared in the London bookstalls in
1914, on the eve of the First World War. (This may account for the fact
that the first CARRADOS book, entitled simply Max Carrados, was never
published in the United States, but only in England.) Later books in
which the sightless investigator appears are The Eyes of Max Carrados
(1923) and Max Carrados Mysteries (1927), together with a single story
in The Specimen Case (1924). All are collections of short stories: there
is no CARRADOS novel.
Mr. Bramah, who is also widely known for his humorous works, including
the delightful pseudo-Chinese parables, "The Kai Lung" tales, is one of
the most self-effacing of modern authors. "I am not fond of writing
about myself," he explains diffidently, "and only to a less degree about
my work. My published books are about all that I care to pass on to the
reader." So successful has he been in this objective that not even the
year of his birth is certain—though his autobiographical first book,
English Farming and Why I Turned It Up (1894), places the event
inferentially in the 186o's or early 1870's. Described by his friends as
"the kindest and most amiable of men," the author lives to-day in quiet
retirement in Hammersmith. A small bald man with twinkling black eyes,
he is an authority on numismatics (an attribute shared by CARRADOS),
while the knowledgeable backgrounds of the Kai Lung books suggest a
sometime residence in the Far East. Aside from these few circumstances,
little is known of him save that he writes under a partial pseudonym (he
was born Ernest Bramah Smith).
The blindness of MAX CARRADOS, in the skilful Bramah stories, is never
the meretricious bid for popularity that it would become in the hands of
a less able or conscientious author, but a unique and legitimate adjunct
to detection. Drawing on the well-known fact that a disability of one of
the senses often enhances and sharpens the others, Bramah endows
CARRADOS with the entirely believable capacity of "seeing" by other
means than with his eyes. This gives him as a criminologist (at least as
a fictional one) an advantage that more than compensates for his
handicap. Occasionally the tales lean a little too far in the direction
of intuition, and at other times they partake of the monotony of the
arm-chair method; but for the most part they have a basis of sound
investigation and deduction, imaginatively set forth.
Wise, witty, gentle MAX CARRADOS is one of the most attractive figures
in detective literature—and a worthy protagonist to bring the epoch to
an end. No discussion of the era will be complete, however, without
brief mention of the "one-book" authors—those writers better known in
other fields of literature, who made a single contribution to the
detective story—and a few of the outstanding "border-liners."
Israel Zangwill's (1864-1926) partly satiric novelette, The Big Bow
Mystery (1891), clearly deserves a better fate than its present
obscurity; perhaps some enterprising publisher may be persuaded to bring
it back into print in a format suited to the present day. Lord Charnwood
(1864- ), the distinguished British biographer of Abraham Lincoln, wrote
a modern and eminently readable detective novel in Tracks in the Snow
(1906). Produced before his elevation to the peerage, it was originally
issued under his family name of Benson, and has been republished in
recent years under his present title. Grand Babylon Hotel (1904), by
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), reveals at least a strong vein of
detectivism. Some critics include The Wrong Box (1889), by Robert Louis
Stevenson (1850-1894) and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, in lists of police
fiction.
Among the earliest attempts to create feminine sleuths we must recognize
Catherine Louisa Pirkis' Experiences of Loveday Brooke: Lady Detective
(1894), George R. Sims' (1847-1922) Dorcas Dene: Detective (1897), and
M. McDonnell Bodkin's Dora Myrl: The Lady Detective (1900). Michael Dred:
Detective (1899), by Robert and Marie Connor Leighton (parents of Clare
Leighton, the artist), has some interest as perhaps the first story to
make the detective the murderer. Hesketh Prichard's (1876-1922)
woodsman-sleuth NOVEMBER JOE finds place also among the oddities and
curiosities.
The "border-liners"—authors whose fiction falls somewhere between the
undoubted detective story and such related forms as mystery, criminal
adventure, or intrigue—can not occupy us long. The adventures of Louis
Tracy's (1863-1928) INSPECTOR FURNEAUX and M. P. Shiel's (1865- ) PRINCE
ZALESKI were claimed by their respective creators to be detection, but
seem in retrospect somewhat closer to mystery; the disputed
collaborations of the two as "Gordon Holmes" present the same objection.
Another collaboration, that of L. T. Meade (1854-1914) and Clifford
Halifax, in the 1870's, produced some early examples of the scientific
method. "Robert Eustace" has lent his medical knowledge to a number of
professional fictionists. John Silence (1908), by Algernon Blackwood
(1869- ), is now and then included in lists of this sort. Vincent
Starrett calls Grant Alien's (1848-1899) Hilda Wade (1899), completed by
Conan Doyle from Alien's notes, "one of the great stories of pursuit and
detection and one that is too little known"; some others of Alien's
stories also qualify in some part. A few of the "Johnny Ludlow" tales of
Mrs. Henry Wood (1814-1887), better known as the genteel authoress of
East Lynne, disclose a strain of domestic sleuthing against Cranfordian
backgrounds. The countless spy-and-intrigue novels written by E.
Phillips Oppenheim (1866- ) occasionally approach detection, as do the
rather imitative secret service tales of William LeQueux (1864-1927).
While Thomas W. Hanshew's (1857-1914) CLEEK stories, beginning with The
Man of the Forty Faces must, in John Carter's words, "be read to
be believed." Mrs. Belloc Lowndes (1868- ) made two notable
contributions to the fringe of detective fiction with The Chink in the
Armour (1912), a psychological study from the point-of-view of the
unsuspecting object of a murder plot, and The Lodger (1913), a masterly
fictional analysis of the Jack-the-Ripper murders. Mrs Lowndes has
published many later novels, repeating and varying the formulas of her
two memorable tours de force, but none of them has ever had the success
of the originals. Her HERCULES POPEAU stories represent a legitimate, if
rather slight, approach to detection per se. RAFFLES, the Robin Hood-ish
and once highly popular crime-hero created by E. W. Hornung (1866-1921),
Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, sometimes varied his burglarious career
with investigation, and even when he played an unrelieved criminal role,
his adventures were good detection in reverse. The RAFFLES stories are
worth re-reading to-day—if only to discover what Earle F. Walbridge, an
American aficionado of "the blood," means when he says that over them
hovers "a faint suggestion of decadence." To the modern reader they
frequently present aspects of humor not intended by the author.
Hornung's The Crime Doctor (1914), is "straight" if forgotten detection.
Barry Pain's (1862-1928) CONSTANTINE Dix stories also view the problem
through the culprit's eyes. In their respective metiers, Mrs, Lowndes
and the Messrs. Hornung and Pain all bear a discernible ancestral
relationship to the Inversionist school of the following generation:
Francis Iles, Richard Hull, Anthony Rolls, et al.
These are only a few, e pluribus; The list could be continued
indefinitely. But it is not the obligation of this book to recognize
every author who has at one time or another approached the hem of
detection. Our work is sufficiently cut out to suggest and trace a few
of the principal trends and study in some detail the really influential
contributors.
Chapter 5 Page 1 to come soon
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