BLOODY PAGES: THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY NOVELS

I. The mystery novel from Edgar Allan Poe to the “pulps”

The modern mystery began with Edgar Allan Poe. Back before there was a Scotland Yard or an FBI, Poe created the first fictional detective—although he never called his main character that. C. Auguste Dupin was sent, in 1841, to investigate some murders in the Rue Morgue.

Other macabre stories followed—“The Gold-Bug,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” In the latter, he did something that modern writers do all the time: he took the mysterious death of a real New York woman named Mary Rogers and made the names and the locations French so his Parisian detective could try his hand at solving the case. Although Poe was an American, his mysteries were set in France.

Dupin was also the first cerebral detective. Less a man of action than one who tried to figure out who killed the victim, meticulously piecing together the clues in “Rue Morgue” where two women have been murdered—one beheaded, the other stuffed up a chimney. He then outperforms the police buy figuring out that the killer is an orangutan.

[READ FROM “THE BLACK CAT”]

In this single story, Poe creates and develops themes that continue in the mystery genre to this day. His chief innovation—the amateur detective—sets the stage for countless sleuths One only has to scan the mystery sections of any bookstore to see all the amateur protagonists living there. From cooks to zoologists. My own hero, Thomas Martindale, is a college professor turned amateur detective.

Poe also established the detectives need for a partner, in this case to tell the story and act as a sounding board. In some cases, the partner is a real law enforcement person—because an amateur can’t get access to evidence or arrest people or know police procedure. He also started something that other writers—including me—follow. Making the amateur more effective at solving the crime than the real police, who Poe often portrayed as bumbling and, at times, idotic. I can say that I love doing that!)

From the beginning of his career as a mystery writer, Poe wrote short stories. Indeed, early mysteries were short stories, not the novel we read today. In fact, Poe enjoyed a period a financial stability after he turned to writing such stories for magazines. They would later be collected in book form. In 1842, however, Poe’s wife got tuberculosis and his life fell apart. He turned to drink again and his productivity fell. The unexpected popularity of his detective, Dupin, however, caused him to write two more stories in include him—“The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Purloined Letter.” In doing so, he created another first: the detective series.

Unlike in Great Britain, however, where the detective in this period appeared in great literature written by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the American detective counterparts after Poe’s death in 1849 sunk t the lowest forms of popular publications—like the tabloids of today. These were called story papers and dime novels and printed on cheap paper—hence the name “pulps.” These rags provided the true roots for the modern mystery.

Before going into this phenomenon, however, let’s take a look at another innovative author, Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. His character has come to exemplify what we think of when we hear about amateur detectives. His name often becomes a term of derision used by other characters, as in “What do you think of that, Sherlock?” His oft-stated phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” said to his sidekick, is also used a lot as slang.

Doyle enrolled in Edinburgh University in 1876 to study medicine. There he met two men who later inspired his main character. Dr. Joseph Bell, for whom Doyle served as surgeon’s clerk, was the model for Holmes. Bell’s ability at figuring out what was wrong with his patients by deduction was the model for Doyle in creating Holmes. Although Doyle wrote his first mystery in 1879, Homes did not appear on the scene until 1887, when “A Study in Scarlet” appeared in the magazine, Beeton’s Annual Christmas.

In Holmes and his sidekick, Dr. John H. Watson, Doyle perfected what Poe had invented with C. Auguste Dupin: the brilliant, eccentric detective whose rather pedestrian associate served as his Boswell. Once the two became flat-mates at the most famous address in fiction, 221 B Baker Street in London, Watson became not merely a reporter but the human filter through whom the sometimes outlandish plots are made to seem more plausible. Whether battling a poisonous snake in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” or wresting atop Reichenbach Falls with his nemesis, Professor Moriarity in “The Final Problem,” Holmes is the clear precursor of not just cerebral detectives but the two-fisted hard-boiled private eyes of modern times.

[READ FROM HOLMES]

In all, Doyle wrote 60 Holmes adventures, 56 of them are narrated by Watson, 2 are third-person, 2 more are first person told by Holmes himself. Only 4 are novels. The sleuth’s hawk-nosed, slender visage—best exemplified by Basil Rathbone in the series of 1940s movies (with Nigel Bruce as perhaps an overly bumbling Watson—and his deerstalker cap, Inverness cape, and meerschaum pipe are familiar to us all—at least those of us of a certain age!

Even after Doyle’s death in 1930, Homes career kept going. Often parodied, often copied. In 1974 Nicholas Meyer wrote The Seven Percent Solution based on Holmes. In film, Holmes has also encounter Jack the Ripper (“A Study in Terror”) and had his private life depicted by Billy Wilder. The most recent interpretation of these stories was on PBS with Jeremy Brett playing Holmes.

Another major influence on the modern detective novel came along in the mid 19th century in the person of a real man, Allan Pinkerton, who founded the first private detective firm in the United States. The Pinkerton Agency became the model on which the next 100 years of detective fiction would be based.

Pinkerton was born in Scotland and worked as a cooper—a maker of barrels—in his early life. After a few years as a political activist in England, he and his wife sailed to America, where they settled in Chicago. In 1847, while cutting wood for barrel staves, he discovered a hidden camp of counterfeiters and helped the sheriff capture the gang. The publicity from his action led to us appointment as a part-time deputy sheriff in a rural Kane County. He later became a full-time deputy in Cook County. Two years later, he became the first detective on the Chicago police force, where the city’s status as a center of transportation and commerce in the Midwest led to an alarming increase in crime. He mixed it up with criminals and was soon the target of several attempts to kill him.

Tiring of political interference, Pinkerton singed on as a Specail United State Mail Agent. Went undercover in Chicago as a postal clerk to investigate mail thefts.

With police in all jurisdictions overworked, he saw the need for a private agency to help them. In partnership with a local attorney, he set up the North-Western Police Agency in Chicago and offered his services to the business community. Firm soon grew to be the largest and most successful. Biggest customers were the railroads which used Chicago as their hub. The agency’s logo—an eye with the slogan “We Never Sleep”—inspired the term “private eye.”

He established professional standards for his people—including the first woman operative—and called them “dicks.” Had an internal set of rules and code of ethical standards. His people had to maintain journals and documentation that became the permanent record of each case. The “Pinks” even created the first rogue’s gallery—a photographic archive of the criminals they dealt with. Developed a network of criminal informants. Result was a skilled agency that got the job done with local police agencies failed.

Coverage by The Police Gazette, a national monthly magazine founded in 1845 and dedicated to covering crime stories, fueled the fame of the agency. Pinkerton continued his early political activity especially on behalf of the abolitionist movement and that brought him into contact with supporters of an Illinois attorney named Abraham Lincoln.

After Lincoln was elected president, Pinkerton was hired to prevent possible attempts on the president’s life, including one on his inauguration day.

After the start of the Civil War, the government hired him to set up the U.S. Secret Service. Gather intelligence on Confederate war activities and ferret out spies. By war’s end, and after P published a booklet on the agency, he and his company were well-known nationwide.

A parallel trend was occurring in publishing at this same time with the beginning and growth of an American phenomenon, the dime novel, the television of its time in terms of the mass entertainment it provided the public.

Cheap paperback books first published in 1860 by Beadle Publishing in New York. Most cost more than a dime and were not long enough to be considered novels, but the name stuck until the 1920s.

Original ones did cost a dime—“Malaeksa, Indian Wife of the White Hunter. Averaged 64 to 128 pages in a 4 by 6 size. Price and format dictated by length of story.

For an incredible 60 years, these paperbacks—prototype for the dominant part of publishing today—had a remarkable run. Helped by two technical innovations—steam pres (quicker, higher volume printing) and cheap pulp paper made from wood pulp. Reduced cost of producing the books.

At the same time, the number of potential readers vastly increased because of the rise of public schools. More people were learning to read. Plus an influx of immigrants from Europe because of the Napoleonic wars. Another boon—purchase by soldiers because the dime novels easily fitted into their pockets. Cheap source of entertainment.

Beadle’s success caused other companies to get into this new genre. By the 1870s, dime novels and so-called story papers were flourishing across the country with dozens of series, hundreds of titles, and millions of readers.

Oddly, the first stories resembled westerns as much as what we consider today as mystery novels. Because crime fighters were an extension of the frontiersman and gunfighter. Also, Indians and cowboys still roamed the streets of even large cities. The Pinks spent as much time on horseback chasing train robbers as they did in buggies or on foot.

So westerns were a mainstay of these early dime novels, but most had a crime-solving aspect. Indeed, even a well-known hero like Deadwood Dick might venture into Coney Island or Detroit to solve his cases.

The floodgates on these books as a series opened in 1872 when the Old Sleuth Detective appeared on the scene—the first detective serial.

They were the creation of Harlan Page Halsey. Hero was really a young man who disguised himself as an old geezer to trap the bad guys. The first two-fisted, superhuman detective—handsome, brilliant, strong and tough, and a master of disguise. The Old Sleuth Detective Weekly was published from 1885 to 1910.

The model for the Old Sleuth was said to be Allan Pinkerton. The success of the series caused Pinkerton to release his own casebooks in both hardcover and dime novel editions. The first was The Bankers, Their Vaults and the Robbers in 1873. The books were an immediate success, bringing both fame and some income to the Pinkerton during times when business was slow. The casebooks continued after Pinkerton died in 1884.

In 1886, Nick Cater made his debut and became the most enduring of the dime novel detectives. “The Old Detective’s Pupil or the Mysterious Crime of Madison Square,” and other short stories appeared in New York Weekly, a story paper published by Street and Smith. They became so popular that the company soon published a full-length Nick Carter novel. A slight delay due to the fact that the author, John Coryell, also wrote popular romance novel as Bertha Clay. So another writer was hired- Frederick Marmaduke Rensselaer Dey wrote the first novel in the series Nick Carter Detective. He continued to write one 25,000 page novel a week for 17 years. Gave new meaning to the term hack writer.

Cater did not smoke, drink, curse, or chase after women. He was extremely honest, well-groomed and he was also a master of disguise, able to turn himself into someone else in a matter of seconds by reaching in his pocket for a fake mustache or glasses, not to mention ropes, guns, handcuffs and turning his coat inside out.

The formula, while sounding corny today, worked very well.

A virtuous hero fighting crime with lots of action. Nick Carter appeared in dime novels until 1915—for a total of 800 different titles.

[READ FROM NICK CARTER]

One of the last traditional dime novels to be published. Nick himself appeared much longer in magazines. In 1960s, a new paperback series came out called Nick Carter—Killmaster. 200 novels before ceasing.

Plus four French films (1909-1912), a series of American silent films, and a debut in a talkie in 1930 with Walter Pigeon as Nick. In 11972, Robert Conrad played him in a TV movie, “The Adventures of Nick Carter.”

The rise of other forms of entertainment like movies led to the demise of the dime novel. By 1915, publishers were converting them into pulp magazines which contained stories, not all of them with a crime fighting theme.

[Go through mystery book and show pictures and read titles]

II. The Hard-Boiled Thirties

Dashiell Hammett provided the next milestone in mystery fiction—well-written novels that were as much good literature as narrative about crimes and crime solving. Hammett was born in Maryland in 1884 and grew up in Baltimore and Philadelphia. In 1915, he joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton Agency. His mentor, James Wright, was a hard-nosed fireplug of a man who became the model for Hammett’s fictional detectives. In 1918, Hammett enlisted in the Army where he got TB. Although he returned to the agency, his health was not up to the rigors of the job, nor was his leftist politics, which came into conflict with Pinkerton’s union-busting style. With a family to support, he became a jewelry store clerk and an ad copywriter.

In 1922, he placed a short story in the magazine Smart Set; later the same year he placed another story with Black Mask, “Arson Plus,” in which he introduced the anonymous operator the Continental Op. He will be the protagonist of 28 stories and two novels. Hammett based the works on his Pinkerton days.

His spare prose and deadpan understatement, added to his own experience, lent his stories credibility few mystery writers of the time had.

In 1928, he submitted this first full-length manuscript to Alfred Knopf, publishers. Blanche Knopf agreed to publish the book but suggested that he tone down the violence. Red Harvest is published in 1929. Paramount immediately bought the movie rights.

[READ FROM DAIN CURSE]

Knopf accepts The Dain Curse, again asking for changes. It come sout to critical acclaim. A year later, The Maltese Falcon is published, again to good reviews. He completes the Glass Key. This has been a remarkably productive period for Hammett.

In 1930, he moved to Hollywood and worked on parts of scripts. Meets Lillian Hellman and they begin a long affair. In 1931, he wrote the first 65 pages of an early version of The Thi Man. A film version of The Maltese Falcon starting Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels came out that same year.

The Thin Man was published in 1934, and a movie version released the same year starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, wealthy amateur sleuths. 5 such films came out between 1934 and 1947.

Sadly, Hammett is one of those writers who peaks early and never really reaches the same heights again. In his 5 novels, he apparently said everything he had to say. Despite many attempts, he never writes anything of value—mostly short stories and movie treatments—until his death in 1961. Tempetuous life with Hellman and dogged by early flirtation with Communist Party.

[READ FROM HAMMETT]

Critics credit Hammett with paving the way for much of what came next in crime fiction: Red Harvest prefigures Mickey Spillane; Dain Curse leads the way into Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald in a complex yarn of family skeletons in the closet; The Glass Key abandons the private eye for an amoral anti-hero in a story of big city politics that set a pattern to be followed by John D. MacDonald and Elmore Leonard. In the Thin Man he presents the mystery as a novel of manner and sets the pattern for husband and wife detective teams from Mr. and Mrs. North on radio to Moonlights on television.

Another influential writer gained fame in the same period. Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, grew up in England, worked as a journalist and served in the British army during WWI.

He moved to Los Angeles and became an accountant, then a successful oil company executive. The collapse of the oil industry during the depression sent him back into writing, this time for pulp magazines.

In the stories, he introduced Philip Marlowe, a compassionate man whose wisecracks were mixed with harsh language. Later, he put together several Marlowe stories in The Big Sleep, his first novel published in 1939. Though he not gain the same early fame as Hammett, readers did like his vivid, metaphor-strewn language and Hollywood immediately liked his exciting, if confusingly plotted tales of the Los Angeles of the period. Colorful characters from the underworld to high society.

Even though he lacked the real private eye background of Hammett, Chandler’s world of big-shot gangsters and troubled socialites seemed authentic. And they loved his descriptions of L.A., as he called it, a city with a personality.

[READ FROM ‘THE LONG GOODBYE’]

Hollywood loved Chandler and Marlowe too. Dick Powell played him in “Murder, My Sweet” (1944). Humphrey Bogart did so in The Big Sleep (1946). James Garner did so again in Marlowe (1960).

Chandler also wrote for Hollywood, but never screenplays of his own work. He wrote Double Indemnity (1945) and Strangers on a Train (1951). Both classics.

In his influential essay, “The simple art of murder,” Chandler defined the lone-wolf American private eye. “He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr. I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin. If he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with a rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust of sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

Between 1939 and 1958, there were 7 Marlow novels, plus several collections of short stories.

As with Hammett, his later years were plagued with alcohol and trouble writing.

[READ FROM MYSTERY BOOK ON AGATHA CRISTIE, ELLERY QUEEN, ERLE STANLEY GARDNER, AND MICKEY SPILLANE]

III. Hollywood and the mystery novel

The silver screen has loved mysteries since the silent era. At first, scripts were adapted from novels after they were in print. I’ve talked about Doyle, Hammett, and Chandler. Poe’s work has been adapted over the years too.

[READ FROM PAGE 142, HISTORY OF MYSTERY—MOVIES MADE FROM NOVELS]

Today, crime is a staple of both movies and television, both network and cable. They are my favorite kind of show, especially those where the crime is solved as the show progresses. A true who-dun-it.

[HOLD UP BOOKS AND READ TO SHOW EXAMPLES OVER THE YEARS]

IV. The modern mystery novel and true crime books

You can’t enter any bookstore without encountering a mystery section, in some big stores a huge collection with the real and amateur detectives abounding. And the amateurs usually do other jobs along with their amateur crime-solving. Cooking, gardening, science, military, music, Native Americans, government, the academic world. Latter is what I include with my crime solving. I try to give readers something else along with that—a peek into something they might not know about.

I could go around this room and you all might have a different favorite mystery writer.

In recent years, a new sub-genre has come into existence—the true crime book. Starting with In Cold Blood by Truman Capote in 1965, these books have become very popular. Many authors write these books. A favorite in the Northwest is Ann Rule. They read like fiction but they are factual accounts of crimes.