"Pfui. Are you a dunce, or do you take me for one?"- Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout's The Doorbell Rang, 1965)
A noticeable gap in my reading are the
tomes of essays, biographies and papers on detective fiction, which has a valid
reason and the foremost one is their penchant for spoiling the endings of the
stories being dissected. I prefer to discover them for myself with such works
as Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991)
and The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary, 1942-1947
(2009) as a compass, but the insightful comments on P.D. James' Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) and Books to Die For (2012) were also
everything but appetizing.
However, I assume you would still make an
effort to do the research in order to (at the very least) get your basic facts
straight, but Curt Evans, a Mystery Scholar worthy of the name, shattered that
illusion in his review of The Eames-Erskine Case (1924) by A. Fielding.
If you haven't read Curt's post here is what was said: "I recall one academic writer
stating that Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn, who debuted in 1934, was the first
English Golden Age police detective protagonist, which is not even close" and when I commented with disbelief, "it illustrates the problem when a critic's
mental world of Golden Age English detection consists only of the Crime Queens
and maybe Innes and Blake."
I don't
consider myself to be a genuine scholar or student of the genre, more of a
knowledgeable enthusiast of the game, but there was a day I had yet to pick up
a mystery novel and start from scratch. In the beginning I had only references
to other writers from A.C. Baantjer and Agatha Christie, until the internet
made collecting vintage mysteries look almost too easy. I didn't inundate myself in
this subject to earn stripes in academia, but for the simple and vulgar fact
that I enjoy reading them.
| Gotta Solve 'Em All! |
Now,
let's assume for the sake of argument that search engines are pipe dreams of a
far-flung future and research is something you mainly do inside your head, you're
still left with the works of the Crime Queens, Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake
– which gave me food for thought. Did these dummies think Freeman Wills Crofts and John Dickson Carr were fictional mystery writers, because Hercule Poirot
discussed them alongside Ariadne Oliver in The Clocks (1963)? Who did they
think Tommy and Tuppence were imitating in Partners in Crime (1929)? How
do they explain The Detection Club and the round-robin novels the Crime Queens
participated on? Perusing the work of the various club members would've given a
pretty good start to get a more complete picture of the (British) detective
story.
You
cannot not be aware of these mystery writers, once you start skimming
the surface of the genre, even if you limit your reading to a handful of
writers. I understand the need to condense huge chunks of information, however,
should someone like me appear to have a better grasp and understanding of the
genre's history than an actual academic writer – as the Roderick Alleyn comment
seems to point out? What kind of academic standard is that?
The
only solace we can take from this is that murmurings coming from the various
Ivory Towers now has to share the stage with a plethora of diverse views and opinions
on detective fiction, which, from my point of view, shows how incredible superficial
those murmurings can be at times. And how sad, how very, very sad, that a bunch of
blogs by mere readers have more credibility as a source of reference than whatever
made that luminous observation about Alleyn and on (one of) its chosen
subjects in general. How embarrasing.
Well,
there really wasn't a point to this post except to point out an annoying piece
of idiocy, which has been bugging me since I read it and, hopefully, it'll bug
you enough, next time one of these specimens opens their trap in your presence,
you'll tell them what would've happened if you carried a squirt gun and
flu-spit. Or just point out their mistakes, if you want to be nice about it.