Crime Fiction History
... solves the crime with a detached sensibility. Typically, as seen in the case of ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ Dupin shows the reader at the end of the story that the solution was simple all along – the police have not managed to solve the crime because they are ‘somewhat too cunning to be profound.’ The detective is presented as a sharp observer, gifted with brilliant analytical ability and in a wider sense, introduced a template for many of the detectives to appear in the nineteenth century. Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ also produced a template for the structure of a crime story which is in the form having a crime committed (usually a murder), a detective investigates, a number of suspects are considered and then the guilty party is discovered and imprisoned, killed or allowed to escape at the conclusion. The template of a detective can be seen in the character of Sherlock Holmes. His art of detection consists in logical deduction based on minute details which escape everyone’s notice, and the careful and systematic elimination of all clues that in the course of his investigation turn out to lead nowhere. Conan Doyle also introduced Dr. John H. Watson, physician who acts as Holmes’s assistant and who also shares Holmes’s flat in Baker Street with him. With the Holmes stories, Doyle established the conventions of the detective story genre, and achieved enormous popularity due to the world and action of the stories reflected in the values of their late Victorian audience. The society was confident in its industrial and imperial might, valuing science and rationality, conscious of a relentless improvement in all aspects of life stemming from its power and prosperity whereby the threats of crime could be solved by rational means, as demonstrated by Sherlock Holmes. The link between the values of a society, and the methods and values of its crime solvers, has been utilized as an element of crime fiction ever since. In the early stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the relationships are those between the detective and the case and the detective and the sidekick. Later, in the work of an author like Agatha Christie (time of the Golden Age,) the relationships expand to include the connection between the detective and the suspects. In Christie’s whodunit, the emphasis shirts from the brilliant detective’s following-up of clues through a range of territories, to the successive investigation of the stories and half-truths of a reasonable large group of suspects, immobilized in place and, effectively, in time. To maintain her audience’s interest, each suspect appears to have ‘something to hide’ (usually a less important crime, i.e. an unacknowledged sexual or other relationship, a desire to protect another party, or some other private obsession.) While forfeiting the audience’s primary interest, once revealed these minor by-plots provide much of the books’ novelized material, as well as the camouflaging undergrowth within which the apparently least likely suspect can be revealed as the murderer. Much of Christie’s novels are set in a limited or closed landscape as seen in “A Murder is Announced (1950)” whereby the chain of events occur in Chipping Cleghorn. Emerging rather slowly from a chorus of similar old gossips, Miss Marple powerfully embodies the quietist notion that no special training or empowerment is necessary for women’s traditionally allow gift for ‘snooping’ into their neighbours’ affairs to be transformed into the social usefulness symbolic...