The Sleuth Complex
by Ronald Knox
LET it not be reckoned as vainglory if one who has been guilty of writing detective stories attempts criticism of the same branch of literature. For, when I speak of detective stories, it is self - evident that I mean detective stories other than my own. A poet may mouth out his own verses, either in solitude or, if his guests have no time to escape, in company; an orator may rub the bloom off his own periods by declaiming them beforehand in his bath; even the humorist can raise, now and again, the ghost of a chuckle at the echo of his own joke, suddenly reborn in memory. But the writer of detective stories — he alone is pure altruist; he alone can derive from his compositions no taste of that quality which his readers find there; never for a moment can he take his seat in the audience and enjoy the show; he is condemned to hang about behind the scenes. Never for a moment does the specious bonhomie of the villain impose upon him; never for a moment does he lose confidence, despite all clues, in the innocence of his hero and heroine. A priest may not shrive himself; a dentist cannot professionally attend himself, and, by the same law, a man cannot enjoy his own detective story. It is, then, with no professional interest that I give expression to my doubts about the future of this art. It will last out my time.
Let it be understood that by a detective I do not mean a man who goes about with a revolver. I do not mean Sexton Blake, nor those cat - lived, rubber - limbed supermen who haunt lonely houses, blundering into traps and blundering out of them again, in the pages of a ‘Sapper’ or an Edgar Wallace. Nothing can be more distressing to the numerous admirers of her work than the direction which Mrs. Christie’s thoughts have taken in The Big Four. She, the queen of mystification, seems to have made an excursion — only temporary, it is to be hoped — into what must be called movification; she has written a ‘novel of the film’ in which Hercule Poirot, the infallible, flounders about amid the schemes of his enemies with the engaging simplicity of Richard Hannay or Bulldog Drummond. Actually, in the worst vein of shockerography, she has condescended to a mysterious Chinaman.
No, no, this is not detection. Your true detective story is not a series of thrills, released reel by reel, but an organic mystery, whose last three chapters explain its first three, with all the precision of Euclid or St. Thomas Aquinas. It is an intellectual exercise; the reader, if he is energetic, may try to guess the solution as it proceeds, or he may simply lie back in his chair and feel certain that the solution is coming, like the school boy who is in a position to ‘look up the answer.’ My fear about this type of literature is that its modern popularity is forcing it into an artificial mould. It conforms to a type, as authors always will conform to a type when they see that the public wants just this and nothing else. So, for example, the old comedy of manners conformed to type, among the Greeks and Romans especially—the angry old man, the spendthrift heir, the faithful friend, the parasite, the designing female, the comic slave, became stock figures, who had to appear in every play, lest the audience should rise and demand their money back. So, too, with the melodrama, now being ousted from its long reign by the popularity of the cinema — the villain, the innocent heroine, the dark, dangerous woman, the athletic curate, the humorous villager, had their recognised right of entry. Nor was it only that the characters were stock characters; the incidents were stock incidents. Can we feel certain that the same decay will not overtake that finest flower of modern literature, the detective novel?
Already, it is to be observed, we have travelled some way in this direction. The victim of the detective story — how rich he nearly always is! Or she, as in The Sheringham Mystery. It was Mr. Bentley who started it, I think, with Trent’s Last Case, and how often has it not been repeated, in The Secret of Chimneys, The Red House, The Rasp, The Death of a Millionaire, The Verdict of You All, and so on. Obviously it is right that the victim should be rich: ‘I thought you’d like it,’ as Michael Finsbury says, ‘and I’ve arranged that you should be positively rolling in wealth.’ I think Aristotle says in the Poetics that the central figure of the drama should be some great man, a prince or a noble; and in our day, of course, the millionaire has usurped the place of both. He is rich, therefore he dies without our sympathy; he is rich, therefore he has a large house (see plan on page 38); he is rich, therefore he has (or hasn’t) left a will, and that adds complications, and motives.
And then the Butler, the old, rather deaf butler, who had been in the family for twenty years — never less than twenty years. I have got my eye on that butler for my next criminal. And there is the daughter, niece, or what not, who believes in the hero through thick and thin. And there is the Detective’s Friend, who has never varied since Watson’s days, the wholly unintelligent recipient of half - confidences, the minimum thermometer of the reader’s intelligence. And there is the tramp who Didn’t Do It, but came in by accident and left his footmarks all over the place, and the elderly female relative, who is generally hiding a secret, but always the wrong one; and the chauffeur, who was away that night visiting his widowed mother; and so on. And the villain is nearly always a competent amateur actor; we ought to be told about that, by the way, early on in the book; it is unfair to drag it in in the last chapter. The detective himself is clearly, in danger of developing into a type; and for that reason the most determined efforts have been made to vary him. He has been represented as old, fat, blind, absent minded, a woman, a priest, a don — anything except (till lately) a policeman. Foreigners, like Hanaud and Poirot, might rise superior to the livery of officialdom; in England we are a nation of amateurs, and our successful detectives must be amateur detectives. Besides, this principle concealed a good deal of ignorance on the author’s part about official police methods. Lately I have discovered an undergraduate who knows all about the police — not first - hand acquaintance, that is common enough, but all about their establishment, their rules, their ranks — and I hope to make use of him. But in an ordinary way your author wanted a hero who knows as little about Scotland Yard as himself—wanted, therefore, an amateur.
In recent stories, the Force has begun to come into its own; Mr. Wills Crofts does not shrink from associating great intellects with large boots, and the same may be said for The Verdict of You All and The Death of a Millionaire. Perhaps this means a revolt from that perpetual improbability of detective stories, the presence of the amateur detective at the spot where the crime is committed. But, if the tendency grows, it will be harder than ever to give our sleuth - hounds proper characterisation. They do not smoke opium at the Yard, nor fall in love with millionaires’ nieces, nor quote Herrick. Can the detective story maintain originality for long, at our present rate of output? I used to wonder (before jazz came and solved the difficulty) whether a time would not come when the musicians had used up all the possible tunes in the world, and no more could be written. My musical friends assured me that my fears were fantastic; there was an almost unlimited number of possible combinations. Can the same be said about plots?
This does not worry the novelists of our day, since they have given up plots and taken to psycho - analysis. But a detective story must have a plot; it cannot merely reflect a mood or dissect an inhibition. And the recipe of detective stories is a comparatively limited one. Mystification depends upon one or other of a few well - worn expedients — the false alibi, the room that seems hermetically sealed, the false clues left about by accident or by design, the alias, impersonation, bluff; ingenuity in the choice of weapons and in disposing of loot or of corpses, the double cross — there is not much more to it. Try, even now, to think out a new formula for a detective story, and then ask a well - read friend whether it is new; ten to one you have been anticipated. What shall we do when there are no more plots left? We must go on producing them. Literature is an escape from life; and the literature of mystifications reflects an age in which we have, most of us, determined to give up the riddle of the universe. The indefatigable human intellect still bids us speculate whence we came, why we are here, whether life is worth living, how it ought to be lived, and what it is all about, any way. It would never do (would it?) to let this curiosity - complex get the better of us. It might lead us to the most surprising, nay, to the most awkward conclusions. We must arrange, then, a transference; as Aristotle bade us purge ourselves of pity and fear by the stage representation of them, so we must get rid of our tiresome inquisitiveness by diverting it into safe channels. Now, why was it that the cake of soap remained untouched, although the bath had plainly been used? Let us give our brains to the problem.
