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Crime fiction history: everything you wanted to know
00:44:33
From Hercule Poirot to Sherlock Holmes, Martin Edwards answers key questions on the history of the crime fiction genre
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- [01:45]
Isabel King
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. From Agatha Christie's Poirot to Benedict Cumberbatch's memorable portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, crime fiction has long been popular. So in today's episode we're looking at the genre's history and how it has affected attitudes to crime over the years. For this Everything youg Wanted to Know episode, Isabel King put your questions to crime writer and expert in the history of crime writing, Martin Edwards.
- [02:22]
So Martin, I just want to start with a really basic question of how do you define crime fiction?
- [02:28]
Martin Edwards
Well, Isabel, a basic question, but a pretty tricky one because so many different books are on the perimeter of the genre that it's hard to come up with an all encompassing definition that really works and is yet meaningful. So the way I like to look at it is to think of crime fiction as involving stories where the central focus is on a crime and also on entertaining the reader. And there are many, many individual novels, ranging from Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment, Kafka, the Trial, John Fowles, the Collector, and many more that may or may not be seen by some people as fitting within crime fiction, but they're outlier. I think that entertainment is the key and focus on crime. It's as simple as that.
- [03:23]
Isabel King
And what other sub genres of crime fiction?
- [03:26]
Martin Edwards
Well, again, because it's such a very broad church, there are many different subgenres. The classic detective story, where you're either a private individual or a representative of the official police. That's one extremely popular genre. It's had many iterations in terms of the police procedural, which was particularly prevalent in America in the 50s and 60s and has enjoyed a renaissance in more recent years as well. But you have romantic suspense, you have adventure stories involving crime. You have thrillers where the emphasis is on suspense and excitement, psychological suspense. So there are many, many different branches. And of course, there are sub genres within each category. So the Locked Room mystery, the Closed Circle mystery, and so on. And again, I think that people do worry about definitions very often. They're useful for categorising books to some extent, but I think it's probably a mistake to get too hooked upon them, because what matters at the end of the day is the story.
- [04:39]
Isabel King
Absolutely. Well, with something that is so difficult to define and has so many sub genres, what would you say was the first crime novel and when was it published?
- [04:48]
Martin Edwards
The book that seems to me to be the first recognisable crime novel, as we would understand that term, is a book that dates from 1794. And it's a book called Caleb Williams or Things As They Are, written by William Godwin. And he was a revolutionary. He was the father of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein. But he was also very interested in the politics of the day. He was particularly excited by what was going on in France, the revolution. But Caleb Williams is a cat and mouse story. It's a story about a hunt. And he wrote the book by beginning at the end, a method that's still very popular with many crime writers today, and working backwards from that when constructing his plot. And he was trying to make political points. And the book today, to be honest, is quite a dry read. He wasn't really a great literary stylist, I don't think. But it's interesting and it's a landmark because it has elements that we can recognize as belonging to the crime genre.
- [06:05]
Isabel King
You say there, that's what you would classify as the first crime novel. We did have a question come in from Instagram, which was, did Edgar Allan Poe really create the genre, or was he inspired by texts that just haven't endured? What would your answer to that be?
- [06:20]
Martin Edwards
Well, I think Edgar Allan Poe deserves huge credit because he created the first recognisable, brilliant detective, the great detective, the tradition that continues to this day. Edgar Allan Poe, in 1841, wrote a short story called the Murders in the Rue Morgue. It was a locked room mystery. Somebody's found dead in a room where there's no evident means of access. The windows are shuttered, the doors are locked. You can't get in from below, you can't get in from above. And the mystery is solved in a pretty outlandish way, it must be said, by a great detective. This is the Chevalier Sea, Auguste Dupin. The story is set in France, in Paris. Even though Poe was American, he was fascinated by France. And I think it lent a touch of exoticism to this particular mystery. And Dupin's brilliance, the Art of detection, is reinforced by the fact that the story is narrated by an unnamed friend of his who admires Dupin. Dupin's a cold reasoning machine in many ways. He's not a particularly lovable character, but he's brilliant, and he can see things that the official police cannot. So when the police are baffled, it's a case for Dupin. And I think that that story is definitely a landmark because Caleb Williams was not a detective story. It was a crime novel. But this particular short story, I think, inaugurates the detective story proper as we understand it today.
- [08:08]
Isabel King
Speaking of detectives and their obviously inherent role within crime novels, who was the first fictional police detective, and was he in what we would consider a traditional crime novel?
- [08:19]
Martin Edwards
I think the first really significant police detective was created, perhaps unexpectedly, by Charles Dickens. And this is Inspector Bucket, who features in Bleak House. Now, Bleak House is one of those novels I mentioned earlier that's on the fringe of the crime fiction genre, but really it's just a great Victorian novel. And Inspector Bucket is by no means the protagonist or even a major character, but he's a significant character. He's a. A good detective. He's hardworking, he's very respectful. But Bucket is, I would say, the first successful attempt to create a memorable police detective character. He's very different from Dupin, the brilliant maverick amateur. And I think that he's got a touch of realism that Dupan doesn't have. So Inspector Bucket for me, is a key figure. And he was followed some years later, later by Dickens friend Wilkie Collins, who created Sergeant Cuff, who's the detective in the Moonstone, one of the great Victorian detective novels. And Sergeant Cuff is an interesting and likable character. He doesn't get everything right, but he's an appealing individual. And he's also got a slightly eccentric habit. He's very fond of growing roses. And this is really paving the way for all the gimmicks that we see in detective fiction through the years, right up to the present.
- [09:57]
Isabel King
Many people will maybe read crime fiction as a form of escapism. They like the idea of problem solving, finding the baddie, and everything's okay in the end. Is that the approach that was taken to early crime fiction?
- [10:10]
Martin Edwards
I don't think so, because crime fiction was really not recognized as something specific, a distinct genre. It evolved over time. Time Poe was working on his own. Dickens and Collins were good friends. They were both very interested in crime, in real life crime, real life detection, as well as introducing elements of crime and detection into their own fiction. But I don't think that writers of that time saw themselves as following any particular line in terms of restoring order to a disrupted society. It's just that crime is always with us, and naturally it featured in their fiction. But the idea of the detective story, in particular the classic detective story as a type of fiction which offers the kind of comfort and escapism and satisfaction that you're referring to, Isabel, is very deeply rooted. And if we fast forward to the 1940s, the poet W.H. auden wrote a fascinating article called the Guilty Vicarage. And in this essay he draws a connection between the classic detective stories he sees it and Christian faith. He sees society as a kind of Garden of Eden that's then disrupted by. By the criminal act, very often murder. And then the detective comes along to solve the problem and put everything right. And this idea of the detective restoring order to a disrupted society has proved enduringly popular, both with readers and with critics. And I think it's a somewhat selective interpretation of the genre. And Auden freely admits this in his essay, but it's nevertheless a very interesting take.
- [12:16]
Isabel King
You mentioned there, that people see society as being disrupted by crime. Which leads me quite nicely onto my next question, which is, have global events such as the World wars affected how crime fiction has been written, when people are basing it on their real lived experiences?
- [12:35]
Martin Edwards
Yes, I think if we look back at the history of the genre, we can see certain landmark events as having a real Profound influence on the way that crime fiction was written then and subsequently. It wasn't always fully recognized at the time, but I think with hindsight, you can take a retrospective view and understand that there was a connection between those stories and the world in which the writers were living, the experiences they were going through. I think a very good example is the change in detective fiction that, as I see it, occurred after the First World War. And I think that before the First World War, the predominant form of the detective story was the short story. After the First World War, reading tastes changed. More novels were being written, and also authors responded to the devastating events that they and their readers had lived through. So the slaughter in the trenches in France affected everybody, not just those who were killed or injured. And a number of those who were injured came back and wrote crime fiction. But quite apart from that, there were people who were bereaved, lost loved ones, lost friends. It was a massive upheaval, a global phenomenon. And then immediately you had the pandemic, the so called Spanish flu, the influenza outbreak that killed more people than died in the first place. World war and these two devastating events had a huge effect. And I think it was almost inevitable that people who were writing at the time, and certainly people who were writing detective fiction at the time, would react in some way without necessarily understanding precisely the cause and effect that was going on at the time. So the mood after the war and after the pandemic was that people wanted to have the fun. And I guess that after our own recent COVID pandemic, we can identify with that. And that's the way people reacted in Britain. In the States, you had the Roaring Twenties, you had what was called play Fever. People loved playing games. The crossword puzzle became very popular, and so too did the detective novel. And that was a novel where the idea of the author playing fair with the reader became very important. And the detective novels at the time, in many, many cases were really structured like games, with challenges to the readers and clue finders and so on. And then again with the Second World War, society is profoundly influenced by that too. And in the aftermath of the Second World War, people were less concerned with playing games. They were deep shaken across the world by what had been going on with the Nazis, with the dictators, and also this discovery of weapons of mass destruction. And so there was a change in the way books were written. The psychology of the criminal, morbid psychology became a central motif increasingly in crime fiction. And it was more about that than it was. It was about the puzzle as it had been in the, as it's often called, the golden age of detective fiction, between the two world wars. And this is not to say that detective fiction in the Golden Age style didn't continue to be written, but in many ways, the focus of the younger writers, the new writers and the critics as well, who play a part had moved on. And so there are two good examples, I think, of how a massive impact on society can have a really significant effect on the way that crime fiction is written.
- [16:52]
Isabel King
Something that happened during the golden age of detective fiction was the creation of the Detection Club. Could you tell me more about that and why it was created?
- [17:00]
Martin Edwards
Yes. Well, the Detection Club grew out of an idea that Anthony Barclay came up with in 1928 of inviting a few fellow authors whom he admired to dinner at his home in Watford. What was different in 1928 was that, by and large, crime writers did not know each other. They were working individually, they didn't meet up. There were no festivals, there were no book signings, there were no events of the kind that are absolutely commonplace today. There were book launches, but only very occasional. And of course, there's no social media, there's no X, there was no Instagram, there's no Facebook. So people were not in touch with each other even when they shared the same passion in the way that we are so easily today. And Berkeley thought it would be a good idea to get together with a number of people who he thought have something in common with him. So it was a social concept. And these dinners became very popular. He thought it would be a good idea to form a club of elite crime writers, detective writers. And this is where the idea for the Detection Club came. The idea found favour with a number of the people he'd invited to dinner, people like Dorothy L Sayers, the creator of Lord Peter Wims, who was very enthusiastic. And so, by 1930, having alluded to the possibility of such a club in a typically cryptic way in a terrific detective novel published in 1929 called the Poisoned Chocolates Case, one of the great detective novels of the Golden Age, beyond a doubt. Berkeley put his idea into practice at the start of 1930, and his first idea was to approach Arthur Conan Doyle to become president. Conan Doyle, sadly, was unwell and unable to accept the invitation. He died a few months later. So Berkeley approached G.K. chesterton, the creator of Father Brown. And Chesterton agreed. So they had their stellar name. Chesterton was a hugely popular and influential journalist and broadcaster, as well as a prolific writer, not just of detective fiction, but on many other topics. Chesterton had written possibly the first significant essay on detective fiction, a defense of detective stories, as early as 1901. So he was absolutely the ideal man for the role. And a group of people joined together to form the founder members. Other members were invited by election, secret ballot. And the Detection Club soon became a byword for a group of elite British. In those early days, they were British and Irish writers who were trying to upgrade the quality of detective fiction because they were very conscious that as well as the terrific novels that were being written in the 20s, there's also a lot of chunk. And so they wanted to exclude the mass producers of what they saw as poorly written crime fiction, in particular thrillers, they didn't have much time for. So in those early days, they were excluded from membership. It was an eccentric organization. It was a dining club, pure and simple. But it had ambitious ideas and they started to write collaboratively. And within literally a few months of formation, they were writing a collaborative detective story for the BBC that was broadcast and more or less simultaneously serialized in the listener magazine with a contest for readers to see if they could solve the mystery. That was a story called behind the Screen and it was so popular that the BBC begged them for another one and they wrote another one together. Barclay Sayers, Agatha Christie, who was one of the founder members, and others. And the second one was called the Scoop. It was set in a newspaper office, had a storyline inspired by a real life crime, which was something members of the Detection Club were very interested in. The influence of real life crime on their writing. It was a hot topic of conversation after dinner. So although it's a small and odd little grouping, it achieved a reputation that was quite disproportionate in many ways to its size and scale. And the club has continued ever since then. So founded in 1930, it's now a sprightly 95 year old. I'm the the 8th president and my predecessors have included not just Chesterton, but Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie. So it has remained a small group with a focus on the social side. But even now, when there are so many festivals, there's so much social media. The Detection Club continues to get together three times a year and continues to produce the occasional book.
- [22:37]
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Martin Edwards
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Isabel King
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- [23:58]
Isabel King
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- [24:18]
Martin Edwards
Well, I think it was one of those profound landmark events, even though initially it didn't seem to be significant. And what Conan Doyle was interested in was writing. Generally. He enjoyed reading detective stories, but his main passion was historical fiction. He wrote a lot of that over the years, but he had trained in medicine under someone called Joseph Bell, who was very keen on observation and detail as a diagnostic tool. So by looking at the patient, by assessing the whole person, you can learn something about whatever ailment they might be suffering from. And it occurred to Conan Doyle that you might be able to apply that kind of rigorous deductive reasoning to a detective story. And this idea appealed to him because he was interested in the idea of playing fair with his reader. And he had compared to the writers of the Golden Age, a somewhat narrow concept of fair play. But he did think it was important because there were a lot of pulpy crime stories being written at that time. We're Talking about the 1880s, where the solution in effect came out of the blue. There was no way that the reader could have any idea of what was going on. The solution was pretty random. And Conan Doyle thought, and he was quite right, that this was artistically inelegant and unsatisfactory. So his idea was that he would play fair with the reader by creating a detective who would be meticulous in his reasoning. And this was Sherlock Holmes. That was his unique selling point. And in some ways, Conan Doyle took the model of Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin, the brilliant reasoning machine, with the admiring friend who narrates his adventures. And he created Dr. Watson, who's a much more humanized figure and a much stronger character and a very warm character. Someone that we, when we read the stories, we can identify. And that contrast between Watson as a kind of everyman figure and the brilliant, cerebral but difficult Sherlock Holmes was very effective. Couple that with the very atmospheric writing style this was, is a fantastic recipe for detective fiction. Of course, it's one that's been imitated countless times ever since. But Conan Doyle took the elements from Poe and refashioned them in a very endurable way. The first couple of books, A Study in Scarlet and the Sign of Thor, didn't make a particularly great impact. But once Conan Doyle was commissioned to write a series of half a dozen short stories, stories for the Strand magazine, he really found his niche. Sherlock Holmes is really seen at his best in the short story. It's ideal as a form for that kind of character, that kind of mystery told evocatively, with lots of atmosphere. The pea soup fogs in London and so on. And really from that moment on, Sherlock Holmes was on his way to becoming not just the most popular and successful fictional detective of all time, but I would argue, in many ways the most successful fictional character there has ever been.
- [28:15]
Isabel King
Is it true that Conan Doyle also had a lasting impact in real life criminal cases beyond his writing of crime fiction?
- [28:22]
Martin Edwards
Yes, he did. He was a man of many parts. He was a titan in many ways. So Conan Doyle impact was enormous. And he applied, as you rightly say, Isabel, those detective skills that he'd given to Sherlock to solving real life crimes. He was involved with quite a number of cases, real life cases. In particular, miscarriages of justice fired his imagination. There was a case involving a man called Idalji, somebody of a minority ethnic group background, who was brutally treated by the justice system. And Conan Doyle weighed in on his behalf and achieved great success. There's another case involving somebody called Oscar Slater. So Conan Doyle's interest in crime and detection and achieving justice is certainly very evident in the Sherlock Holmes stories. But it extended to real life in a very remarkable way. He, even when Agatha Christie disappeared famously in 1926, was consulted by the press for his explanation for the great mystery of the vanished novelist. By that time he was very interested in spiritualism, so he consulted a spiritualist for guidance. But really it was the cases such as Hidalge and Oscar Slater that really established that reputation he had.
- [29:59]
Isabel King
So we've mentioned a couple of times throughout this that crime fiction is often based on real life experiences and the things around authors. And one of the questions we had from our listeners was what forensics were available in the past that crime fiction authors could then include in their stories.
- [30:18]
Martin Edwards
Well, Conan Doyle, to go back to him, was, because of his medical and scientific background, extremely interested in forensics. And in fact, there have been books written about his own influence. The influence of the Sherlock Holmes stories aren't real life forensic science, and we see that interest cropping up in the stories. But there's no doubt that forensic science has played an important part in detective fiction and other crime fiction as it's evolved over the years. The Crippen case, for instance, back in 1910, which was really the Old Bailey trial, where Bernard Spilsbury, the renowned, or some would say notorious, forensic scientist and expert witness, more recently described in one book as a lethal witness, he gave evidence for the prosecution in many cases. And his pioneering work in forensics was of great interest to crime writers. Dorothy El says, for instance, picked up on one real life crime involving forensic dentistry, and this provided the raw material, if you like, for a short story featuring Lord Peter Wimsey called In the Teeth of the Evidence. So forensics, although of course it's commonplace and constantly discussed today, was certainly around during the Golden Age and before, and it was influential as far as many writers were concerned.
- [32:02]
Isabel King
You've mentioned a couple of times Agatha Christie here, and of course, she is the queen of crime. She's probably the most famous female crime fiction writer. But are there any other women who greatly influence the genre that listeners should know about?
- [32:16]
Martin Edwards
Well, yes, there have long been women crime writers going back to the very early days in the later part of the 19th century. Anna Catherine Green was a hugely successful American writer whose first book was called the Leavenworth Case. Introduced a police detective called Ebenezer Grice, a great, great name, and she became hugely popular. Staying with the States for a moment in the early years of the 20s 20th century. Mary Roberts Reinhart was a very, very successful writer, probably as commercially successful as any writer of her era, certainly in the crime field in the States. And she wrote many, many bestsellers, including a story that became a play called the Bat, which was the distant forerunner of the comic Character Batman. So she certainly had a very profound, if unexpected, influence. If we look at Britain, it was really during the golden age, from the late 20s onwards, that women writers really came to the fore. I think it's probably fair to say that for the major part of the 20s, it was the male writers. They were hugely successful, they were very popular. But by the late 20s and certainly into the 30s, their female counterparts were coming into the ascendancy. Christie, of course, as you say, hugely popular, hugely successful. But Dorothy L Sayers was a massive, massive seller with Lord Peter Wimsey stories, books like the Nine Tailors, a wonderful story with a very vocative setting in Fenland, Murder must advertise setting, an advertising business of the kind that say, as herself had worked in a terrific book. But there were others, too many others. People like Josephine Tey, who is a playwright, but moved increasingly into detective fiction. Ngaio Marsh, the New Zealander, still a very popular writer. She created one of the posh aristocratic police detective as Inspector Roderick Allen. And writers like this became enormously successful in commercial terms during the 1930s when Penguin paperback started out, they did 100,000 copies of books by the likes of Christie and Sayers and Marsh, and they sold out. So these women were writing for many, many years, and not only that, making an absolutely indispensable contribution to the genre and its development.
- [35:15]
Isabel King
Even if women were writing crime kind of since the beginning, do you think it was a more male dominated industry, perhaps because of its more unsavoury content and that it was suggested that maybe women weren't suitable to write crime?
- [35:29]
Martin Edwards
There may have been an element of that in the 19th century, but even then you have writers who are enjoying a lot of success with crime stories of one kind or another, and enjoying a popularity that might have seemed a little unseemly in some quarters, but was nevertheless a. And once you come into the 20th century, there's really no stopping the female writers. And one of the things about writing that is very important to notice was that it was actually much more of an equal opportunities profession than most. So for instance, in Britain, a woman who got married during the golden age between the two world wars would have to stop being a teacher because jobs were being protected for men. But those women, women could write and they did write. And this, I think, is one of the reasons, quite apart from the appeal of the stories, I think so many women were attracted to writing crime fiction. And women did play a significant part in the detection club, really from day one. Sayers was hugely involved, hugely enthusiastic Agatha Christie, who was pretty reclusive in general and by nature, particularly after the trauma of the disappearance. In 1926, she actually joined the committee of the Detection Club and later became its president. To this day, she's the longest serving president. So women were hugely involved in the world in a way that was not possible in many, many other worlds, including, for instance, the legal profession and the police. But writing was something that they could do and they did it with gusto.
- [37:29]
Isabel King
A lot of the history of crime fiction that we have covered in this interview has been about the British and the American experience. But one of our listeners asked how the history of it has differed between countries such as England, Ireland, Australia. Could you give any insight into that?
- [37:46]
Martin Edwards
Certainly. I think one of the big mistakes is to think that detective fiction, even in the early days, was confined to the English speaking countries. It's simply not correct. So, for instance, there's a book by Chekhov, an early book called the Shooting Party, written in the latter part of the 19th century, which arguably anticipates the murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. And there are other books that arguably anticipate other, other classics of the genre. For instance, there was a book written in the early 30s by an author called Stanislas Andre Stigman, which many people would argue anticipates. And then there were none by Agatha Christie. I'm pretty sure that Christie was not familiar with the book. She may have been. It's possible she was aware of it, it's possible she read it. But regardless of that, I think think that what is interesting is that other people in very different countries were writing detective fiction as well as reading Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes spread across the world, but the popularity of some indigenous crime fiction, even in places such as China and Japan, can't be underestimated. There was Japanese writer who used the pen name Edeguara Rampo, which is a kind of jokey take on Edgar Allan Poe, who achieved a lot of success and popularity. There's an award, crime Writing Award, named after him to this day. So the interest in reading and in writing crime and detective fiction was very much not something confined to the Anglophone world. It was much more of a glory phenomenon that was recognised for many years. And I think one of the main reasons it wasn't recognised was simply that these stories were not available in translation, so people were simply not conscious of them, but they were there.
- [40:07]
Isabel King
So to wrap up on this interview, I wanted to just ask you, as a crime writer yourself, and someone with a near encyclopaedic knowledge of crime fiction. What would you say is the ultimate piece of crime fiction that listeners should read?
- [40:22]
Martin Edwards
Well, it's of course impossible to pick one because there are so many, but I suppose if there's one landmark text, then it has to be the book. That's the most commercially successful detective novel that's ever been written. And this is Anne Vandu, and by Agatha Christie, because it does a number of things. It's a wonderfully clever and ingenious detective story, but it's also a story that has this fantastic trope of the group of people invited to that mysterious little island for enigmatic reasons. A trope that's used constantly by right writers to this day, paying fresh homage to Agatha Christie time and again. And as one of the characters is murdered after another, of course the tension mounts. So you've got a great deal of psychological suspense. It's a feature of Agatha Christie that's often underestimated. Who will be next. It's not just who done it, but who will be next. That's part of the driver. It's not a long book, but the tension is, is constantly ratcheted up. The viewpoint switches from character to character. We are allowed into the murderer's thought, but we're not told who that person is. And so she plays fair in a very clever way. She plays the game, but we're still bamboozled. And there's something more than that as well, because there's an underlying subtext. This is a book written when. When Britain was on the brink of entering into what became the Second World War, international tensions had been rising. This anxiety about what was going on in the world is very much reflected in books of that time. And when there were dictators such as Mussolini, Hitler around in the world, the legal system in those countries could no longer be trusted. One or two people started to have doubts about the legal system in Britain, the miscarriages of justice that occupy the thoughts of members of the detection club, including Agatha Christie herself. And so what you have underlying and Then There Were none is a story that's actually about justice. And in particular this very difficult and timeless question. If a society loses its moral compass and if we can't rely on the legal system to do justice, what are we going to do about it? And it's yet another reason why I think that if there is one book, one novel that people interested in crime fiction would be interested to read, that has to be be the one.
- [43:28]
Isabel King
That was crime writer Martin Edwards speaking to Isabel King. His non fiction book about the history of crime writing is the Life of Crime Detecting, the history of Mysteries, and their creators. Martin's newest crime fiction book, Ms. Winter in the Library With a Knife, will be published in September 2020.
- [44:17]
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Martin Edwards
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