Anatomy of the Crime Novel

 Talking about Detective Fiction,

by P.D. James;

Faber & Faber, 2009, 159 pages, $26.99.

Most real crime is sordid, intellectually uninteresting, and committed by repellent people, or at least by uninteresting people at their repellent worst. Crime fiction, on the other hand, largely by taking crime away from its real perpetrators and shaping a confection out of it, has fascinated enormous numbers of readers since the nineteenth century. Agatha Christie is reportedly the biggest-selling novelist of all time, but she is only the most popular of an ever-swelling multitude of crime novelists.

The range of writing is wide, from the genteel artifice of a Christie to the blood-soaked “realism” (often in fact just as artificial as the Christie school, but in different ways, and sometimes with more than a suggestion of misanthropy) that has become fashionable in recent decades. Few, if any, readers like all types of crime novel.

P.D. James, born in 1920, has been one of the foremost British crime novelists since the 1960s. While, like Christie, she prefers the setting of a closed, usually middle-class community with a small group of suspects, she differs in her attitude towards the victim and the effect murder has on those concerned.

In a Christie novel, the murder victims are just plot devices. Their deaths excite little grief among the characters beyond the scream of the maid who finds the body. For the Christie fan, each murder is a welcome advancement of the plot and an intensification of the delicious suspense. Christie’s novels have a strong moral component, but it lies in the fact that the murderer is always “one of us”, an apparently decent, usually middle-class person (like most of her readers), who has yielded to the temptation of deceit and followed it all the way to its logical conclusion of murder. The murders in her novels are sins against society, or God, rather than against the victim. James observes:

These novels … deal with violent death and violent emotions, but they are novels of escape. We are required to feel no real pity for the victim, no empathy for the murderer, no sympathy for the falsely accused. For whomever the bell tolls, it doesn’t toll for us. Whatever our secret terrors, we are not the body on the library floor.

The victims are like those nameless characters in movies—Indians shot while attacking a wagon train, for example, or German soldiers blown up by a well-directed mortar—who are created merely in order to be killed during their few seconds on screen. We are not supposed to think about the fact that they have lives that are suddenly and brutally cut short, or about the people who love them whose lives will be forever disfigured by their deaths.

Christie’s enduring popularity suggests that my concern and distaste for this treatment of victims may put me in a minority, but James, at least, is with me: “if we do not care, or to some extent empathise with the victim, it surely hardly matters to us whether he lives or dies”. She also prefers her characters to have credibly human responses:

To find a murdered corpse is a horrible, sometimes life-changing experience for most normal people and the writing should be vivid and realistic enough to enable the reader to share the shock and horror, the revulsion and the pity.

James’s detective Adam Dalgliesh is still properly shocked by the sight of death. Here, in her most recent novel, The Private Patient (2008), he looks at the body of the first victim:

This was not the most horrific corpse he had seen in his years as a detective, but now it seemed to hold a career’s accumulation of pity, anger and impotence. He thought, Perhaps I’ve had enough of murder.

In one sense there is no point criticising Christie, because her novels are unimprovable. Nobody else has ever woven such intricate plots or drawn red herrings so deceptively across her readers’ paths. Many of her devotees find it impossible to work out who the murderer is even on a second or third reading. Like her equally prolific contemporary, P.G. Wodehouse, she created a perfectly realised self-contained fictional world. (James observes: “One of the secrets of her universal and enduring appeal is that it excludes all disturbing emotions; those are for the real world from which we are escaping, not for St Mary Mead.”) James admires Christie’s craftsmanship; she just doesn’t want to write that sort of novel.

While Christie’s novels are rather fun, and many of them lend themselves to film adaptations as comedy, James’s have a darkness and a sense of foreboding that reflect the gravity of the events they describe. She understands the compelling attraction of murder. Here, again from The Private Patient, she describes the experience of Adam Dalgliesh:

As a young officer he too had been touched, even if unwillingly and temporarily, by the power of murder to attract even while it appalled and repelled. He had watched how people involved as innocent bystanders, provided they were unburdened by grief or suspicion, were engrossed by homicide, drawn inexorably to the place where the crime had occurred in fascinated disbelief.

What of other crime writers? How many corpses do they need, and how do they treat them?

Of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fifty-six Sherlock Holmes short stories, fewer than half are murder investigations, while in a few other stories there are deaths that are not murders. In twenty-one of the stories no one dies at all, including some of the very best, such as “The Blue Carbuncle” and “The Man with the Twisted Lip”.

In the best Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, two deaths and a disappearance are enough to sustain the terror, reinforced as it is by the mysterious beast, the “desolate, lifeless moor”, and the treacherous Grimpen Mire nearby. On the death of the escaped convict Selden and the grief of Selden’s sister, Watson comments in his narrative: “To all the world he was the man of violence, half animal and half demon; but to her he always remained the little wilful boy of her girlhood, the child who had clung to her hand. Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.”

A television adaptation of the novel in 2002 could be taken as a measure of cultural decline in the century since the novel was written. It killed off three more characters gratuitously, had Holmes inject himself with cocaine in the middle of a case (which he would never do; he occasionally took the drug, despite Watson’s protests, to stave off boredom in periods of idleness) and portrayed the ever-faithful Watson as a sulk.

Ruth Rendell’s Road Rage is another exemplar of current mores. The novel is about the building of a bypass road in the English countryside, the local protests against the road, and a fringe group of extremists among the protestors that kidnaps some locals to hold them to ransom. Of the three deaths, the one that occurs in the middle of the novel is justified, but there is an unnecessary murder towards the end. The murder at the start is completely irrelevant to the story and looks as if it was inserted after the first draft was finished by a nervous publisher with no faith in the ability of a fine story to hold the reader’s attention. Kidnapping, even without resultant deaths, has more potential for suspense than many writers seem to realise.

In the eight crime novels of Josephine Tey, one of James’s favourite authors, only six people die altogether (if we exclude the medieval victims in The Daughter of Time, whose murders Tey’s detective Alan Grant investigates from his hospital bed in the middle of the twentieth century). By the end of the novels we know all six victims thoroughly as people; they are not just convenient corpses.

Tey’s The Franchise Affair (about an allegation of kidnapping) is generally recognised as one of the great novels in the regrettably small category of the “murderless mystery”. Another is Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night. For some reason or reasons—laziness, incompetence, timidity, lack of imagination, sensationalism, sadistic tendencies, commercial considerations—few crime writers are prepared to add to this category, which occupies a mere page and a half of the 535 pages of The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing.

Alexander McCall Smith’s eleven No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels, set in Botswana, have included very few deaths, and no murders. That the novels have been phenomenally successful while the mysteries investigated in them are rather mundane may perhaps awaken a few more writers to the commercial possibilities of not killing. However, the actual detective work takes up only part of the novels, and one wonders how the agency can possibly employ Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi and cover costs. 

The television detective series Foyle’s War, set in Hastings in the Second World War, has had some superbly constructed stories. With the tensions already inherent in the war, the producers might have had the courage to try a lower civilian body count. They took great pains to get the other period details right, then made wartime Hastings one of the bloodiest places in the history of England.

Oxford had that title in Inspector Morse’s time. When they began a new series making the main character Morse’s former partner, the devoted husband and father Lewis, the producers decided to make Lewis more interesting by killing off his wife in a suspicious road accident and making the previously sane and balanced detective into yet another fashionably “damaged” character. James comments about this trend:

Would anyone, I wonder, create a fictional detective who enjoys his work, gets on well with his colleagues, is happily married, has a couple of attractive well-behaved children who cause him no trouble, reads the lesson in his parish church and spends his few free hours playing the cello in an amateur string quartet? I doubt whether readers would find him wholly credible, but he would certainly be an original.

In fact, her own Adam Dalgliesh is an unfashionably sane, wise, courageous man. Until a few years ago he was not rare. Ruth Rendell’s Reg Wexford is another personable inspector. For many years the German television detective Oberinspektor Stephan Derrick stood calmly and firmly for justice in the angst-ridden city of Munich. For two decades until they starting killing each other, the officers of The Bill were a force for good in Sun Hill.

James’s observations about her own methods and principles are especially illuminating. In this short book she does not stray for long from Britain, the home of the detective story, and she is generous to other writers. But in her subtle way she makes a firm case for a more humane approach to the genre, and to the characters who must die in order for it to prosper.

George Thomas is deputy editor of Quadrant.