![]() Loved as all these figures were, however, there were new voices, eager to follow Hammett's lead and write about characters who operated in the real world rather than the one Raymond Chandler described as "stilted and artificial to the point of burlesque".Ĭhandler famously said that Hammett had given murder "back to the people that commit it for reasons" - and it was Chandler who took the hardboiled detective to another level. These cosy characters set the stage for the hugely popular Ellery Queen and, later, Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout's obese and taciturn sleuth, who was America's answer to Sherlock Holmes. It's hard to imagine Parker quite so twittery and lovestruck over Englishmen in boaters or egg-headed, mustachioed Belgians.Īmerica did have its own golden age: in 1925, Earl Derr Biggers created Charlie Chan and he was quickly followed by Philo Vance, SS Van Dine's priggish gentleman sleuth. Dorothy Parker wrote how Spade had her "mooning around in a daze of love such as I had not known for any character in literature since I encountered Sir Launcelot". The hardboiled gumshoe was an instant success. Hammett published The Maltese Falcon in 1930, distilling all this experience and his own radical world-view into the creation of Sam Spade. The detective's role was to remain anonymous, protect good people from bad, and keep an emotional distance. These were the rules of detection as taught to Hammett during his own career working for the famous Pinkerton agency. The Op had his own way of doing things, and Hammett had a unique way of describing them. In 1923, Dashiell Hammett wrote a story called Arson Plus for Black Mask magazine, introducing a ruthless investigator known only as the Continental Op. In the Twenties and Thirties they were pre-eminent, but across the Atlantic a very different kind of detective began to take on cases. These characters, in what Graham Greene described as "stories of forged wills, disinheritance, avaricious heirs and of course railway timetables", now seem foolish and superior. With a servant for a sidekick he was, like Campion, and Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn, an aristocrat who, like most detectives from this period, has not dated well. Sayers' Wimsey was perhaps the silliest of them all. Christie's Poirot, who first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921), was a twitching bundle of vanity and foible, the brilliance of his brain contrasting sharply with his seeming disregard for the victim - though as far as detective fiction of the era went, he was hardly unique in this respect.Īllingham - perhaps the most unappreciated of the writers of the golden age - would later develop and stretch the genre, most notably with Tiger in the Smoke, but early on, Albert Campion was little more than a Woosterish, silly-ass figure. The Decalogue also instructs that stories shall feature no more than one secret passage and contain no Chinamen, so it has perhaps not dated awfully well, but as a rubric it informed much of detective fiction's golden age.įor whatever reason, these tales were massively popular and their detectives were quickly pressed to the public bosom. In 1929, RA Knox constructed a set of commandments for crime writers, known as the Decalogue, which insist, among other things, that the detective cannot withhold clues from the reader and must not himself be the killer. There was a good deal of rule-making along such lines. ![]() Members had to vow that their fictional sleuths would not be reliant on "divine revelation, feminine intuition, mumbo-jumbo, jiggery-pokery, coincidence or Act of God". Chesterton had strong feelings about the way crime fighters should operate, and his beliefs were at one time enshrined in the oath sworn on joining the British Detection Club. Another successful practitioner was GK Chesterton, whose Father Brown appeared in 1911. These were men who brought scoundrels to book in days infinitely more genteel - though Wimsey was known to wave a shooting stick around when his dander was up, and Holmes once rapped Moriarty across the knuckles with a meerschaum.īefore the First World War, the short story was detective fiction's predominant literary form. We have indeed come a long way since the days of Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey, for whom such behaviour would have been anathema. At one point in my latest novel, The Burning Girl, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne - my series character - is involved in extracting information from a witness through the somewhat unconventional use of a steam iron.
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