Part ONE
IN THE BEGINNING: THE MOTHERS OF DETECTION
"All goes to plan, both lying and confession, Down to the thrilling final chase, the kill."
--from "The Detective Story" by W.H. Auden
In the 1800s, murder was decidedly not a proper topic for well-bred ladies and gentlemen. When the young Victoria became Queen of England and Great Britain in 1837, propriety ascended the throne, and the Queen's rigid standards of behavior dominated not only her own subjects but the upstart citizens of England's former colonies as well. Even at the raucous frontier fringes of the fledgling United States, Victorianism mixed well with the still-strong strains of Yankee Puritanism.
Luckily, more and more people were learning to read, and with literacy came a growing demand for literature in its broadest sense. Although fine books were beyond the financial reach of most people, newspapers, magazines, and cheap storybooks thrived in a market that clamored for entertainment and quick thrills, and even the most high-minded authors (and their publishers) discovered that they could actually make money and gain fame by feeding popular tastes. It was in this environment that the detective story was born.
The first true literary detective was a French gentleman named C. Auguste Dupin--the invention of America's foremost tortured genius, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). With the publication of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841, followed by "The Purloined Letter," "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," "'Thou Art the Man,'" and "The Gold Bug," Poe carved out the fundamentals of the genre. Dorothy L. Sayers credited Poe with the introduction of "the formula of the eccentric and brilliant private detective whose doings are chronicled by an admiring and thick-headed friend." Dupin was, according to mystery writer andcritic Julian Symons, "what Poe often wished he could have been himself, an emotionless reasoning machine."
The brilliant-detective-and-dogged-sidekick formula was just one of the devices Poe innovated. From his fertile brain came the locked room murder, the innocent suspect, the most likely villain, the verbal clue, the cryptic clue, the in-plain-sight clue, the red herring, rudimentary ballistics evidence, armchair detection, fiction built on real-life facts--so many of what Dorothy Sayers called the "deceptions in the mystery-monger's bag of tricks ... ." Sayers went on to declare that, "take it all round, 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' constitutes in itself almost a complete manual of detective theory and practice."
The times were changing dramatically in mid-nineteenth-century England and France and in the United States. The story of the development of detective fiction is a record of relatively rapid cross-pollination among these three countries. The first seed was germinated by Poe. Seedlings were then transported from shore to shore, hybridized, and when conditions were propitious, a true genre emerged.
Howard Haycraft in Murder for Pleasure connected the development of civilian police forces to the rise of democratic states and the realization "that only by methodical apprehension and just punishment of actual offenders could crime be adequately curbed and controlled." The advent of professional police departments came in the early to mid-1800s in England, France, and the United States. With the acceptance of official detection, interest in fictional detection could prosper.
A second factor was the Industrial Revolution, which made the mass production of reading material a viable commercial activity. As Colin Watson demonstrated in his study of the rise of popular crime fiction, Snobbery with Violence, authors like Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray, who understood popular tastes, came along "at just the right moment to reap the benefit of cheap printing, big-scale serialization ... and the direct marketing and wide distribution made possible by the growth of the railways."
A third critical factor was the spread of literacy. Throughout the nineteenth century, more and more of our foremothers and forefathers were learning to read, and what they wanted to read was sensationalism. Romanticism and, later, reaction against Victorian repression ignited a wildfire of lurid storytelling to satisfy the growing public demand. Even in polite British society, ladies and gentlemen wanted their excitement dished up hot and spicy--if not in their drawing rooms, at least between the covers of their books. Despite the condemnation of Victorian critics, nineteenth-century readers relished new tales of horror and sexualmetaphor, snatching up Mary Shelley's1 Frankenstein (1818) at the beginning of the century and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) at the end. In-between, they indulged in the soulful Gothic romances of the Brontë sisters, the stormy poetics of Byron and Shelley, the dark passions of Thomas Hardy.
The most successful writers of popular sensational stories were often women who spun feverish tales that revolved around dark secrets, dramatic revelations, and tragic consequences. What they delivered was truly sensational: overwrought tales of sex, betrayal, and death, usually justified by neatly high-minded conclusions. But readers knew that the sins along the road to the final moral--illicit love affairs, bastard children, hidden identities, bigamy, incest, and murder--were the real fun.
In 1860 and 1861, East Lynne, the first story by Mrs. Henry Wood (Ellen Price Wood, 1814-1887), appeared as a magazine serial and was later published as a complete novel. Although rejected by several cautious English publishers because of its controversial content, East Lynne eventually sold more than one million copies during Mrs. Wood's lifetime, making her a very wealthy woman. The story includes elements of detection (but no detective) and the legal prosecution of an old crime. Critics at the time were astounded by the author's presentation of courtroom procedures. The Saturday Review noted "an accuracy and method of legal knowledge which would do credit to many famous male novelists."2
An even more scandalous English novel, Lady Audley's Secret, was penned by young Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Wildly popular, this high melodrama was crammed with crime, from bigamy and blackmail to murder, leading to the unmasking of the charming Lady Audley's true nature. A lawyer's daughter, Miss Braddon (Mary Elizabeth Braddon Maxwell, 1837-1915) lived much closer to the edge of social acceptability than Mrs. Wood. By the time Lady Audley's Secret reached the British public in 1862, Miss Braddon had moved in with her publisher, John Maxwell. Because Maxwell's first wife was confined to a mental institution, the couple lived together without benefit of clergy until 1874, when they were at last able to marry. Together they had six children, two of whom became novelists, and Mary Elizabeth also raised her husband's five offspring.
Her writings, which reflected the influence of the French Realists,won the admiration of contemporaries including Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James, and she enjoyed a long and successful writing career. Like Mrs. Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon never dealt seriously with detection, but toward the end of her career, she included increasingly complex crimes in her books, and her influence on later generations of detective writers was substantial.
American readers in the early nineteenth century were drawn to the moody mysteries of Hawthorne and Poe and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Americans were still very much a part of a frontier culture and favored down-to-earth settings for their thrillers rather than the Gothic castles of their English cousins. Even Mark Twain dabbled with certain facets of the crime story, and he was one of the earliest writers to understand the importance of fingerprint evidence. It was an American woman, however, who took inspiration from Poe's short stories and expanded detection to novel proportions. The first detective novel by a woman is now recognized to be The Dead Letter: An American Romance (1867), written by Mrs. Metta Victoria Fuller Victor (1831-1885) under the pen name Seeley Regester. Mrs. Victor's novel--first serialized in Beadle's Monthly magazine in 1866--included a gentleman police detective named Mr. Burton, and through hundreds of pages, the novel mixed fevered sensationalism with detection and wild trans-American chases. The resilient Mr. Burton does his darnedest to solve the mystery rationally, but in the end, he must turn to his clairvoyant daughter for a resolution: a detective, yes, but hardly Poe's reasoning machine. While the Pennsylvania-born Mrs. Victor was a prolific writer, she was never a very good one, and The Dead Letter is now regarded as little more than a quaint historical footnote.
It was to be another American woman who would finally master the legacy of Poe in long form, eliminate the cheap sensationalism of Victorian romance, and write the first internationally successful detective novel--and she would earn her title as "The Mother of the Detective Novel" almost a decade before the birth of the great Sherlock Holmes.
