Spinners of “Who Dunnit” Yams

SPINNERS OF “WHO DUNNIT” YARNS

AN INDIAN PERSPECTIVE

G. GIRIJA BAI

Ever since Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective genre with his tales of ratiocination, in the first half of nineteenth century, crime story or detective story, as it is variously called, has had no turning . Not only in America and England, not only in English language, every language of the world which can boast of a literary tradition has been attracting writers to this genre of fiction. Here at last is a kind of story which finds popularity with readers of every kind. The highbrow and the low-brow, old and young, students and scholars, elite and working class alike turn to this story with avid interest. A crime story? The antennae are up instantly.

It is not within the scope of this paper to deliberate upon the reasons behind the magical influence of detective story or the “Who­dunnit”. The aim here is only to present a brief review as perceived by an Indian reader. Fiction involving space crimes, scientific crimes and espionage is excluded.

Crime story today largely has an ephemeral existence. More often it is merely ‘pulp’ stuff.

Poe’s own stories did not suffer this fate. Even today his stories are read with fascination and his name is taken with reverence. In his ratiocinative stories Poe had used certain devices of crime detection which have become almost a tradition. He brought in science to the aid of crime detection and introduced the use of microscope and ballistic tests. Making a hero of the detective and making the policemen inferior to the detective in powers of ratiocination etc., are all traditions handed down by this master writer.

The credit for giving the sleuth story lovers their first detective hero who would become the greatest celebrity and would even transcend the bounds of his fictional character, goes to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was writing in the latter half of nineteenth century. Doyle perceived crime detection as a scientific process; accordingly he made his hero Sherlock Holmes proficient in science - in chemistry - which was thought to be the real science in that day. Holmes and his devoted assistant Dr. Watson are the most endearing pair in the world of fiction detectives perhaps. In his own day, so powerful was Holmes’ magnetism that Doyle’s investigative dramas were felt to speak more loudly than Huxley’s arguments and analogies.

As a matter of convention (also coming down from Poe), crime mystery writers give life to a detective hero of their own imagination, invest him with superlative powers such as they perceive as necessary and indispensable in a successful sleuth. This superman hero features in every crime story coming out of his creator’s pen and thrills the readers with his marvellous performance. He may be a police detective or a private detective, depending upon the author’s choice.

Sherlock Holmes, however, had none of the superlative skills of the heroes of later ilk. His dynamism was cerebral and his superlative powers were his scientific method: keen observation, testing of the empirical data (evidence) and deduction of the result. So powerful was the appeal and influence of Holmes, scientific method that some scien­tific thinkers went so far as to say, “Sherlock Holmes pointed the way for many of the ideas and techniques that were later to be discovered as they attempted to contribute information from their various disciplines to the solution of crimes”.

Even some philosophers and semioticians made tongue-in-cheek comments hailing Holmes as the prophet of scientific method and calling his “deduction” nothing but C.S. Peirce’s “abduction”. Mockery apart, the first direct effect of Homes’ method took shape as the first crime laboratory in Lyons”. All this has been stated only to underline the breadth of controversy and interest Doyle’s stories had generated in his own time and in subsequent years.

The second name to reckon with among the sleuth story writers is that of Agatha Christie. Christie, who started at the beginning of this century and wrote well into the middle of it, was a prodigious writer by any standard. Her detective works alone number 184, and she dabbled in other genres too.

Christie’s sleuths have none of the scientific touch or Holmes. Marple arrives at the solution by closely studying the behaviour of the criminal, constructing it from the available clues and information derived from persistent querying of the individuals, connected eye witnesses, etc. Poirot gets his answers by intuitive reasoning.

Both Doyle’s and Christie’s sleuths are learned in their own ways and their erudition is made known by allusions to monographs and works of authority. Their prose is neat and chaste, disciplined. Just as Doyle had popularised scientific method of investigation, Christie may be said to have popularised that psychological method of sleuthing. Besides making use of folk ritual and witchcraft in her stories, Christie scored one over the feminists. Long before de Beavuoir and her school of feminism caught up Christie chose a vocation - sleuth story writing - which was thought to be no job for a woman. And, she did not stop there either. Her female sleuth Miss Marple unhesitatingly had her female qualities and became bluntly professional during the course of her investigations.

Doyle and Christie are the two milestones of sleuth story. As nineteenth century tapered out the stream rushed into wider fields: a multitude of writers, defying any attempt at enumeration, took to sleuth fiction writing. Most of them followed the convention set by the founder master and created a detective hero, then generated a series of whodunnit puzzles, which the hero solved with admirable dexterity and cleverness. This is not to say that Doyle had the field all alone to himself. But none of his contemporaries could blaze a trial as brilliant as his.

Anna Katherine Green, who is considered the mother of detective story, was writing in America almost a decade before Conan Doyle. She introduced a male sleuth Ebenezer Gryce and female sleuth Violet Strange. Austin Freeman in England and Arthur Reeve in America were manufacturing crime mysteries which their respective heroes Dr. Therndike and Craig Kennedy successfully uncovered. Both these sleuths had taken over the scientific method from their predecessor Holmes. These are only a few to mention, the more popular ones. The advance of twentieth century had seen ever-increasing number of writers as well as readers being attracted to this genre of fiction.

By the middle of this century detective story had undergone a sea change and in the latter half it suffered further vast changes. The personality of detective heroes, the nature of crimes, the types of criminals had all metamorphosed qualitatively. Consistent with this trend, the quality of their prose too had gone through a cycle of changes. The chaste and neat prose of earlier writers grew terse, lurid and pacey by the mid-century, which, towards the present decade, acquired a fast, action-oriented pedestrian quality with a scattering of the tinsel (hackneyed, lurid). Likewise, the detectives who were mainly cerebral and scientific in the beginning, became dashing and debonair, shrewed and chivalrous stunt heroes by the mid-century, further changed to fast acting, shrewed, criminal-hunters and stunt men par excellence, towards the approach of current decade.

The criminals too who started out as members of respectable sections of society, less and less belonged there. From doctors and artists and jealous husbands and suspicious wives they slowly became secretaries, club crooners, cello players, barmaids, chefs and chaffers and, in recent years they have been coming more and more from the fringe society: gangsters, hired goons, card sharps, street muggers and bootleggers, book-keepers, racketeers, cheap sluts, pimps .... Though crime by its very nature is an act of violence, in recent times their perpetration has acquired a more pugnacious and disgusting quality. Unclean and uncouth, sporting weird costumes and hairdos, perhaps lavishly tatted, these members of fringe society commit crimes more out of spite, perversity and boredom than for any other valid reason. Naturally to corner such criminals the sleuths have to be tough guys and he-men, their wits and skills a hair-breadth sharper than those of their targets, always outguessing them by a split second and keeping alive. The locale too shifted from posh houses and plush bungalows to way alleys, bar-rooms, hovels, cheap jack motels, eerie joints and call houses.

Going through these changes gradually from Pee to the present times, no wonder the detective story got settled in the pulp class.

Peter Cheyney, Mickey Spillane, Brett Halliday who were writing around the mid-century in Britan and America, created slick playboyish heroes while Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes created tough guy Rambo-ish heroes. Among other well remembered writers are P.O. James, Ngaio Marsh, Cyrill Hare, Dorothy Sayers, Amanda Cross, Cornell Woolrich, Valerie Miner, and Kinky Friedman and Sharyn McCrumb to mention two recent names.

Among these Hare is considered as the master of classic detective story. Himes deals with fringe society of Harlem.

Sayers uses crime more as a platform to argue out other issues, and keeps violence to the minimum. Cross and James also use violence sparingly. James makes elaborate use of myth and symbol. Marsh resorts to witchcraft and folk ritual, like Christie. She also probes psy­chological eccentricities. McCrumb, who says that crime is primarily motivated by a perceived threat to cultural identity, uses crime as catalyst for studying middle class society. Miner, like Sayers, uses crime as a platform, to make a thematic point. Her stories too contain little actual violence.

As far as Indian mystery-story lovers are concerned, apart from Doyle and Christie, whose popularity is universal, other writers who have been widely favoured include Edgar Wallace, Peter Cheyney, Mickey Spillane, Dorothy Sayers, Brett Halliday, P.O. James and John D. MacDonald.

It would be unfair to wind up this paper without mentioning two of the popular sleuth writers, popular particularly with reference to Indian readers. First of them is Erie Stanley Gardner, who wrote well into the ’Seventies. The name rings a familiar bell. Instantly flashes on the mind’s screen the image of Perry Mason, the Californian criminal attorney tall, neat, hard grey eyes, holding a dry martini in his hand; his electrifying court-room histrionics. Besides launching Mason on his road to phe­nomenal success. Gardner tried his hand at detectives of conventional mould. The slick playboy-cum-toughies. And he went in for pairs: first there was the team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam and then the husband-wife team of Duryeas, and Ken Corning, a forerunner of Mason. But these were mere drops in the ocean, no islands of light, which is what Mason turned out to be. Ever since this tall, smart, daredevil attorney with his unorthodox ways, aided by his pretty and efficient secretary Della Street and detective pal Paul Drake of Drake Detective Agency next door, started terrorizing the criminal prosecution lawyers of Cali­fornia, ripping their carefully-built cases of shreds by his cutting cross examination, thundering arguments and dramatic courtroom revela­tions, Gardner needed no more to worry except to spin a new mystery yarn in order to make a new ground for Mason’s histrionics. Gardner made Mason (82 cases) and Mason made Gardner: he more than paid the debt to his creator. While he lasted, Mason dazzled like a diamond. From the detectives of his time Mason primarily differed by his profession. His conduct and manners he kept always impersonal impeccably professional and his luggage business-like and efficient. No pedestrian slang for him. Nor was he a playboy like his contempo­raries. He was a dead serious professional. After Holmes, perhaps Mason is the one hero sleuth fiction celebrated as gloriously, though on a lower plane. But then, perhaps, Mason never aspired to parallel Holmes.

The second name that needs mention is that of James Hadley Chase, who is a writer of recent times. Unlike others of his ilk, he did not create a steady hero for his stories. There are of course a few series, only of two or three stories each: of insurance investigator Mallory and a millionaire playboy Don Micklem, for instance. Largely he wrote without a steady hero. Usually his protagonists find themselves in spooky situations, get nosy and start digging. Sometimes a tardy local official may be probing the case. This casual approach cuts his canvas and hero down to life size, which lends a candid charm to his stories.

Yet, in spite of the breadth and dimension it has acquired over a period of a century and a half, it is rather disappointing to note that this genre has been left out of the historical studies of literature. Some of the sleuth stories undeniably make better fiction compared with some secular works of fiction. Yet historians and historiographers of literature stoically refuse to give this genre a place in their chronicles. Admittedly sleuth fiction is popularistic: but so does a substantial chunk of secular prose fall below the literary meridian. A small part-however small it may be-of detective fiction does transcend the pulp meridian perhaps. Is it then fair to categorically ignore a genre as such, especially one which ways a large section of reading populace from all planes of society and all walks of life? It is not within the scope of this paper to stretch this point beyond this limit.

To cast a glance and sum up, the sleuth story genre which started as a thin trickle with Poe, swelled into a rushing river by the turn of the nineteenth century and grew into a mighty ocean speckled with numerous luminous islets. But the beacon of light emanating from Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes rolls into the far future mingling with the dull glow refulging the blurred line of horizon. And we hear a charismatic voice explaining, “elementary, my dear Watson!”