Talking About Detective Fiction Read Free

evidence of the careful research necessary both for mood and for credibility. These novels, which are becoming increasingly popular, could be said to constitute a separate genre in crime fiction as they do in films.
    If we are looking for the origins of detective fiction, most critics are agreed that the two novelists who vie for the distinction of writing the first full-length classical detective story are William Godwin, Shelley’s father-in-law, who in 1794 published
Caleb Williams
, and Wilkie Collins, whose best-known novel,
The Moonstone
, appeared in 1868. Neither writer would have been gratified at this posthumous distinction. Wilkie Collins in particular saw himself as a mainstream novelist, albeit one who worked within the category which Victorians described as sensational. These works of mystery, suspense and danger with an overlay of horror had an increasingly strong hold on the popular imagination, and there was much argument among critics, both about their literary merit and about their social desirability. Did these sensational outpourings even deserve the name of novel, or were they a new and inferior form of fiction provided to meet a rapaciouspublic demand focused on W. H. Smith railway station bookstalls? This debate has, of course, continued, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was a new and particular concern. In 1851
The Times
complained:
    Every addition to the stock [of the bookstalls] was positively made on the assumption that persons of the better class who constitute the larger portion of railway readers lose their accustomed taste the moment they enter the station.
    In 1863 a leading review in the
Quarterly Review
stated:
    A class of literature has grown up around us… playing no inconsiderable part in moulding the minds and forming the habits and tastes of its generation; and doing so principally, we had almost said exclusively, by “preaching to the nerves.” … Excitement, and excitement alone, seems to be the great end at which they aim…. Various causes have been at work to produce this phenomenon of our literature. Three principal ones may benamed as having had a large share in it—periodicals, circulating libraries, and railway bookstalls.
    By 1880 Matthew Arnold was describing these novels as “cheap … hideous and ignoble of aspect… tawdry novels which flare in the bookshelves of our railway stations, and which seem designed, as so much else that is produced for the use of our middle-class, for people with a low standard of life.” The unfortunate Mr. W. H. Smith, whose bookstalls did so much to promote reading, had apparently much to answer for.
    But in my view the final and accurate words about the controversy were written by Anthony Trollope in his
Autobiography
, published posthumously in 1883.
    A good novel should be both [realistic and sensational], and both in the highest degree…. Truth let there be—truth of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and women. If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational.
    Trollope was undoubtedly categorised by his contemporaries as a sensational novelist and was heredefending his own work, but these words are as true of the sensational novel of today as they were when they were written.
    Both
Caleb Williams
and
The Moonstone
could be described as sensational. Hazlitt, the theatre critic and essayist (1778-1830), thought that nobody who began
Caleb Williams
could fail to finish it and that nobody who read it could possibly forget it, yet I have to admit that in adolescence I found it difficult to get through and now have only the vaguest memory of its long and complicated plot. Certainly the novel has at its heart a murder, an amateur detective—Caleb Williams—who tells the story, a pursuit, disguise, clues to the truth of the murder for which two innocent men were hanged, and at the end a deathbed confession. But Godwin was using this dramatic and complicated adventure story to promote