What Makes A Good Detective Story?

*WHAT MAKES A GOOD DETECTIVE STORY?* *Thoughts From Arthur Conan Doyle and G.K. Chesterton* Remarks by Patrick Killough to The Friends of Black Mountain Library, North Carolina Monday November 3, 2003 Good evening. It is always pleasant to speak to our neighbors in Black Mountain. By next March you and I shall be even nearer neighbors when Mary and I join Herman Muenchen and other friends. We will then transfer our domicile from Swannanoa overlooking Warren Wilson College to Highland Farms Retirement Community in Black Mountain. +++++ Two days hence I shall teach for Montreat College adult education (MCCALL) the fifth of six two-hour sessions on SHERLOCK HOLMES MEETS FATHER BROWN: THE DETECTIVE FICTION OF G. K. CHESTERTON. In that session we shall discuss three short stories and what may be perhaps the deepest, most philosophical detective novel ever written: THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY: A NIGHTMARE. Our class of 19 includes Black Mountain novelist Yvonne Lehman, who is thinking of creating a mother-son detective team: good news for the many readers of her Christian romance novels. +++++ Let us notice how detective writers typically construct their stories. Conan Doyle spoke to this point and and all good detective story writers have followed his example. Listen to what Martin Booth wrote in his biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, THE DOCTOR AND THE DETECTIVE, p. 143. Conan Doyle’s method of working out a plot was simple ... He invented the crime and its solution, plotted the outline and course of detection, then, constructing the characters within it, sat down and wrote it, concealing the climax until the end. A good detective story, that is, no matter what else, is first a puzzle and then the logical unraveling of a puzzle. +++++ For the rest of this evening I will draw on materials from my Chesterton course and speak briefly on what makes a good detective story good. I do not have to invent my theses out of whole cloth. For something important happened in 1929 to create widely agreed standards for what makes a good, honest detective story. Detective writers in England beat me to the punch. In that year Anthony Berkeley decided to found in London The Detection Club. Its first president (or "ruler") in 1930 was none other than Gilbert Keith Chesterton, creator of Father Brown and later of the British civil servant Mr Pond as well as of Gabriel Syme, the detective hero of THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. Later “rulers” of the Detection Club included Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. The mock heroic, humorous “oath” required of new members began building a formidable canon of standards for the detective story genre. Here is the text of that oath. You may find it on the internet at http://www.sfu.ca/english/Gillies/Engl38301/oath.htm Membership in The Detection Club is much coveted and by invitation only. A writer must be sponsored by two other members and approved by the existing members. Membership numbers are small, with the leading detective novelists of the day generally included. The oath is administered by the club president whose title is The Ruler. I invite you in imagination to join me as G. K. Chesterton as I administer the oath to Agatha Christie, represented by Mary Killough. OATH The RULER shall say to the Candidate: --Agatha Christie: is it your firm desire to become a Member of the Detection Club? Then the Candidate shall answer in a loud voice: --That is my desire. RULER: --Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God? --I do. RULER: --Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? --I do. RULER: --Will you honour the King's English? --I will. RULER: --Agatha Christie: is there anything you hold sacred? --Yes, I particularly admire the good manners of M. Hercule Poirot. RULER: --Agatha Christie, do you swear by the good manners of M. Hercule Poirot to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a Member of the Club? --I swear. RULER --Agatha Christie, do you as you hope to increase Sales, swear to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a Member of the Club? --All this I solemnly do swear. And I do furthermore promise and undertake to be loyal to the Club, neither purloining nor disclosing any plot or secret communicated to me RULER: --There being no objections to your candidacy, forasmuch as we are hungry I invite you, Agatha Christie to join our group to-night, and I hold you to the solemn promise which you have given as touching the theft or revelation of plots and secrets. Agatha Christie, you are duly elected a Member of the Detection Club, and if you fail to keep our promise, may other writers anticipate your plots, may your publishers do you down in your contracts, may strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints and may your sales continually diminish. Amen. --Then the Candidate, and after him all the Members present, shall say: Amen. +++++ What makes a Detective Story a Good Detective Story? The humorous content of the Detection Club Oath has been batted about for decades by its members, readers of their stories, in PhD dissertations and by critics. There is, as a result a widely held consensus as to the makeup of the best, fairest, most honest detective stories. --(1) Murder and mayhem need not be involved. They often constitute the puzzle which the sleuth or sleuths are to unravel. But the object just as well can be a falsified will, an act of espionage or indeed anything at all. --(2) There is a difference between a detective story and thrillers or adventure. Car chases, maidens in peril, leering villains may or may not be in a detective story. But what is essential to a melodrama is not crucial to a detective story. Critics, for this reason, speak unkindly of some of Dr John Watson’s narratives of the cases of the great Sherlock Holmes. They may be fun and very exciting. But something, a certain tightness and focus is lacking to make them primarily tales of detection. --(3) A detective story is not about crime and punishment. Crime and evil, per se, are not necessary ingredients.Not every detective is concerned with justice or in turning the person found at the end of a search over to constituted representatives of law and order -- even if the detective is convinced that a crime has been committed. Sherlock Holmes was particularly arrogant in claiming for himself the right to decide whom to punish and whether to punish them at all. --(4) Drama is not enough. In classical tragedy and comedy the AUDIENCE knows important facts which the actors do not know. READERS of a good detective story, however, must see no more than what the story's characters are looking at. The reader must NOT know more than the detective. --(5) The first necessary condition of good detective fiction is that the narrative create a puzzle, a mystery to be solved. {NOTE: To me personally a good detective story, has the flavor of a New York TIMES crossword puzzle or the JUMBLE word games or CryptoQuotes in the daily Asheville newspaper.] --6) The first principle of detecting is to observe and notice as Kipling's Kim was taught to do for “the great game” in India. Or in the wording of Sherlock Holmes, "there is nothing so important as the observation of trifles." --(7) The good detective story makes it possible for the READER to solve the puzzle by scattering enough honest CLUES. Much of Sherlock Holmes, by contrast, has the detective, after all is over, simply telling Watson how he solved the puzzle. Good clues can both deceive and enlighten the reader. This norm has become stronger over the decades. --(8) The detective yarn is logical, rational. Chesterton in particular saw the detective story as one instance of a LOGICAL PUZZLE. An author devises his story both to attract, challenge and mystify the reader. At the end of a good detective story, the reader should say, "Of course! I had all I needed to see that!" Really good detective fiction has evolved in the direction of greater rigor and is highly technical. And Chesterton was one of the first to investigate the techniques. Remember as early as 1930 there were rules and they were approved as part of the code of the Dectection Club of which GKC was first president and Dorothy Sayres was an active charter member. --(9) Ideally the best detective story is a SHORT story. Some detective novels are admittedly long, complex and have relatively few clues and those few may be separated by a hundred pages. This can be an unfair burden on the reader's memory. Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels come to mind. --(10) Finally, it cannot be denied that there are some good long novels involving detection. Think of a detective story as the delicious crust of a pizza pie. Its further content can be very varied indeed. Either as a short story or as a novel a detective story can be allegorical, humorous, brutal, philosophical, political or even religious. +++++ I am willing to defend the thesis that the greatest -- certainly the most philosophical and religious -- of all detective stories is G. K. Chesterton’s THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY: A NIGHTMARE. If you are not familiar with THURSDAY, please come to my next class in two days. It is on the main campus of Montreat College, Gaither Hall Assembly Room from 10:00 a.m. until 11:45. Time permitting, I will give you in a few minutes some of its flavor from the 1939 radio adaptation starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. This novel is great, I think, because its object of its sleuthing is great: is there a reality behind this world, is man free in some sense or completely determined? Is evil merely the backside of the carpet of which the front side is God? Chesterton was clearly influenced by his beloved Book of JOB and by the recently published THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad. As another early member of the Detection Club, Monsignor Ronald Knox, the Bible translator, noted: it was as if whoever commissioned GKC to write THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY had said, “Write a tale something like John Bunyan’s PILGRIM’S PROGRESS in the manner of Charles Dickens’s PICKWICK PAPERS.” Or even of Lewis Carroll’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Let me end by sharing a very few minutes with you from a 1939 radio broadcast of THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. I will speak more of that story again later. The situation is this: two detectives , independently of each other, had been appointed by the London anti-anarchist police to infiltrate the European Council of Anarchists. One is the hero of the tale, Gabriel Syme, a poet. He represents England in the Council of Anarchists, with code name of Thursday. The other is Professor de Worms, called Friday. They have discovered that they, plus one other of the Council of the Seven Days, were really with Scotland Yard. The two are now preparing to meet a fourth key anarchist (Dr Bull or Saturday) to force from him details about an assassination the group has planned a few days hence of the King of England (Tsar of Russia in the book) and the President of France. They must somehow find out from Dr Bull the plans of the Marquis de Saint Eustace (Wednesday) who has gone on to Paris to do the deed. The episode begins with Professor de Vries teaching his detective Colleague Syme a simple tapping finger code. Behind them all, directing them all is the President of the Council of the Days, the enormous and frightening Sunday. "Quick, Watson, the game’s afoot," Sherlock Holmes might say. [Play the finger code scene from THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY: 6 to 10 minutes.] +++++ Thank you. Are there points you wish to make or discuss? -OOO- 11/03/2003 revisited 01/01/2007 and 05/30/2010 =-=-=-=-=-= file: gkc_blkmt.cwk (WP) 11-03-2003

Good evening. It is always pleasant to speak to our neighbors in Black Mountain. By next March you and I shall be even nearer neighbors when Mary and I join Herman Muenchen and other friends. We will then transfer our domicile from Swannanoa overlooking Warren Wilson College to Highland Farms Retirement Community in Black Mountain.

Two days hence I shall teach for Montreat College adult education (MCCALL) the fifth of six two-hour sessions on SHERLOCK HOLMES MEETS FATHER BROWN: THE DETECTIVE FICTION OF G. K. CHESTERTON. In that session we shall discuss three short stories and what may be perhaps the deepest, most philosophical detective novel ever written: THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY: A NIGHTMARE. Our class of 19 includes Black Mountain novelist Yvonne Lehman, who is thinking of creating a mother-son detective team: good news for the many readers of her Christian romance novels.

Let us notice how detective writers typically construct their stories. Conan Doyle spoke to this point and and all good detective story writers have followed his example. Listen to what Martin Booth wrote in his biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, THE DOCTOR AND THE DETECTIVE, p. 143.

Conan Doyle’s method of working out a plot was simple ... He invented the crime and its solution, plotted the outline and course of detection, then, constructing the characters within it, sat down and wrote it, concealing the climax until the end.

A good detective story, that is, no matter what else, is first a puzzle and then the logical unraveling of a puzzle.

For the rest of this evening I will draw on materials from my Chesterton course and speak briefly on what makes a good detective story good.

I do not have to invent my theses out of whole cloth. For something important happened in 1929 to create widely agreed standards for what makes a good, honest detective story. Detective writers in England beat me to the punch. In that year Anthony Berkeley decided to found in London The Detection Club. Its first president (or "ruler") in 1930 was none other than Gilbert Keith Chesterton, creator of Father Brown and later of the British civil servant Mr Pond as well as of Gabriel Syme, the detective hero of THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY.

Later “rulers” of the Detection Club included Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. The mock heroic, humorous “oath” required of new members began building a formidable canon of standards for the detective story genre. Here is the text of that oath. You may find it on the internet at
http://www.sfu.ca/english/Gillies/Engl38301/oath.htm

Membership in The Detection Club is much coveted and by invitation only. A writer must be sponsored by two other members and approved by the existing members. Membership numbers are small, with the leading detective novelists of the day generally included.

The oath is administered by the club president whose title is The Ruler. I invite you in imagination to join me as G. K. Chesterton as I administer the oath to Agatha Christie, represented by Mary Killough.

--Agatha Christie: is it your firm desire to become a Member of the Detection Club?

--Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?

--Agatha Christie, do you swear by the good manners of M. Hercule Poirot to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a Member of the Club?

--Agatha Christie, do you as you hope to increase Sales, swear to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a Member of the Club?

--All this I solemnly do swear. And I do furthermore promise and undertake to be loyal to the Club, neither purloining nor disclosing any plot or secret communicated to me

--There being no objections to your candidacy, forasmuch as we are hungry I invite you, Agatha Christie to join our group to-night, and I hold you to the solemn promise which you have given as touching the theft or revelation of plots and secrets.

Agatha Christie, you are duly elected a Member of the Detection Club, and if you fail to keep our promise, may other writers anticipate your plots, may your publishers do you down in your contracts, may strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints and may your sales continually diminish. Amen.

--Then the Candidate, and after him all the Members present, shall say: Amen.

What makes a Detective Story a Good Detective Story?

The humorous content of the Detection Club Oath has been batted about for decades by its members, readers of their stories, in PhD dissertations and by critics. There is, as a result a widely held consensus as to the makeup of the best, fairest, most honest detective stories.

--(1) Murder and mayhem need not be involved. They often constitute the puzzle which the sleuth or sleuths are to unravel. But the object just as well can be a falsified will, an act of espionage or indeed anything at all.

--(2) There is a difference between a detective story and thrillers or adventure. Car chases, maidens in peril, leering villains may or may not be in a detective story. But what is essential to a melodrama is not crucial to a detective story. Critics, for this reason, speak unkindly of some of Dr John Watson’s narratives of the cases of the great Sherlock Holmes. They may be fun and very exciting. But something, a certain tightness and focus is lacking to make them primarily tales of detection.

--(3) A detective story is not about crime and punishment. Crime and evil, per se, are not necessary ingredients.Not every detective is concerned with justice or in turning the person found at the end of a search over to constituted representatives of law and order -- even if the detective is convinced that a crime has been committed. Sherlock Holmes was particularly arrogant in claiming for himself the right to decide whom to punish and whether to punish them at all.

--(4) Drama is not enough. In classical tragedy and comedy the AUDIENCE knows important facts which the actors do not know. READERS of a good detective story, however, must see no more than what the story's characters are looking at. The reader must NOT know more than the detective.

--(5) The first necessary condition of good detective fiction is that the narrative create a puzzle, a mystery to be solved.

{NOTE: To me personally a good detective story, has the flavor of a New York TIMES crossword puzzle or the JUMBLE word games or CryptoQuotes in the daily Asheville newspaper.]

--6) The first principle of detecting is to observe and notice as Kipling's Kim was taught to do for “the great game” in India. Or in the wording of Sherlock Holmes, "there is nothing so important as the observation of trifles."

--(7) The good detective story makes it possible for the READER to solve the puzzle by scattering enough honest CLUES. Much of Sherlock Holmes, by contrast, has the detective, after all is over, simply telling Watson how he solved the puzzle. Good clues can both deceive and enlighten the reader. This norm has become stronger over the decades.

Chesterton in particular saw the detective story as one instance of a LOGICAL PUZZLE. An author devises his story both to attract, challenge and mystify the reader. At the end of a good detective story, the reader should say, "Of course! I had all I needed to see that!"

Really good detective fiction has evolved in the direction of greater rigor and is highly technical. And Chesterton was one of the first to investigate the techniques. Remember as early as 1930 there were rules and they were approved as part of the code of the Dectection Club of which GKC was first president and Dorothy Sayres was an active charter member.

--(9) Ideally the best detective story is a SHORT story. Some detective novels are admittedly long, complex and have relatively few clues and those few may be separated by a hundred pages. This can be an unfair burden on the reader's memory. Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels come to mind.

--(10) Finally, it cannot be denied that there are some good long novels involving detection. Think of a detective story as the delicious crust of a pizza pie. Its further content can be very varied indeed. Either as a short story or as a novel a detective story can be allegorical, humorous, brutal, philosophical, political or even religious.

I am willing to defend the thesis that the greatest -- certainly the most philosophical and religious -- of all detective stories is G. K. Chesterton’s THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY: A NIGHTMARE. If you are not familiar with THURSDAY, please come to my next class in two days. It is on the main campus of Montreat College, Gaither Hall Assembly Room from 10:00 a.m. until 11:45. Time permitting, I will give you in a few minutes some of its flavor from the 1939 radio adaptation starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. This novel is great, I think, because its object of its sleuthing is great: is there a reality behind this world, is man free in some sense or completely determined? Is evil merely the backside of the carpet of which the front side is God? Chesterton was clearly influenced by his beloved Book of JOB and by the recently published THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad.

As another early member of the Detection Club, Monsignor Ronald Knox, the Bible translator, noted: it was as if whoever commissioned GKC to write THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY had said,

“Write a tale something like John Bunyan’s PILGRIM’S PROGRESS in the manner of Charles Dickens’s PICKWICK PAPERS.” Or even of Lewis Carroll’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

Let me end by sharing a very few minutes with you from a 1939 radio broadcast of THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. I will speak more of that story again later.

The situation is this: two detectives , independently of each other, had been appointed by the London anti-anarchist police to infiltrate the European Council of Anarchists. One is the hero of the tale, Gabriel Syme, a poet. He represents England in the Council of Anarchists, with code name of Thursday. The other is Professor de Worms, called Friday. They have discovered that they, plus one other of the Council of the Seven Days, were really with Scotland Yard. The two are now preparing to meet a fourth key anarchist (Dr Bull or Saturday) to force from him details about an assassination the group has planned a few days hence of the King of England (Tsar of Russia in the book) and the President of France. They must somehow find out from Dr Bull the plans of the Marquis de Saint Eustace (Wednesday) who has gone on to Paris to do the deed. The episode begins with Professor de Vries teaching his detective Colleague Syme a simple tapping finger code. Behind them all, directing them all is the President of the Council of the Days, the enormous and frightening Sunday. "Quick, Watson, the game’s afoot," Sherlock Holmes might say.

[Play the finger code scene from THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY: 6 to 10 minutes.]
+++++