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From Parallels to Present: Rules and Regulations of Detective Fiction
an essay
Spoilers for
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (major)
The Moonstone (minor)
In an October 2023 article for The Times, restaurant critic and columnist Giles Coren related his experience of reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926) to his young children, one chapter a night for about a month. Despite referring to “the drear clunk of the prose and “characterisation” based mostly on clothes, accents and facial twitches,” Coren describes his and his family’s enjoyment of the detective elements. That is until the solution is revealed:
“The NARRATOR?” screamed [Coren’s son], leaping off the bed and storming round the room. “The goddam NARRATOR? That is shit, dad! That is so shit! I’ve given a month of my life to that stupid book and she plays a cheap-arse trick? Dr Sheppard narrated the whole stupid story without telling us it was him? It means every page was a lie! The whole book is a con!”
This personal anecdote is a useful highlight of how much our understanding of detective fiction is based on rules of fair play, to the point of enraging readers who feel as though their time has been wasted if certain “rules” are broken. The essay that follows will explore the idea that detective fiction is primarily a European invention by expanding on these ideas of rules and fair play as well as other defining tropes. This exploration will be related to a selection of texts, from 18th century China to recent America, illuminating how aspects of reason, materialism, and civilised justice are fundamental to Europe's detective literature and therefore its US cousins'. And, finally, modern readers' conception of "detective fiction" as a genre, regardless of place and period.
When I first read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd some time ago, the thing that struck me about how it ended was how neat it is, almost comedically so. I already knew the killer’s identity by the same cultural osmosis that let me know who “Mrs Bates” in Psycho (1960) and Luke Skywalker’s father in Star Wars (1977) were, so I was reading more to see how Christie executed it. If you were to watch the ITV adaptation starring David Suchet as Poirot (from Agatha Christie's Poirot, 1989 to 2013) you might think that Christie’s ending was much the same, with Dr Sheppard ranting about his justness in killing Mrs Ferrars while Caroline (his sister) weeps decorously. But this scene of high emotion is far removed from Christie’s, wherein only Poirot and Sheppard are present, and Poirot graciously allows Sheppard to commit suicide so that his sister need not know and feel disgraced:
“I can trust [Poirot]. He and Inspector Raglan will manage it between them. I should not like Caroline to know.”
The logistics of this feel staggering. Poirot and Raglan are supposed to connive with a murderer to conceal his crime, also coming up with a convenient excuse for his suicide, all while staving off questions from Ackroyd’s family about why their patriarch’s killer is not facing trial, merely so that they might spare Caroline’s feelings?
The bizarre and passionless neat-and-tidiness here is amusing in a modern context, where we expect a degree of emotion from such matters as murder and suicide, but also oddly chilly. It gives Poirot a faintly predatory air, and although aside from its unorthodox solution The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a traditional Golden Age detective story, it allows us to grasp as few others do the feeling of someone being entrapped by a great detective.
In his introduction to a collection of Modern Critical Views, part of a series in his name, literary critic Harold Bloom says of Dr Sheppard:
“[His] dryness conceals not well-bred malice, but something that approximates nihilism. […] his silences are the most eloquent part of him. […] Dr Sheppard kills as a reflex of his own nature: his guilt is never to be doubted, least of all by himself, though his craft as narrator is to admit nothing until the end.”
He is a predator who, in a sense, is caught and killed by another and more ingenious predator in Poirot. The detective holds him close and recruits him as his sidekick exclusively to spring a trap on him at last and force him to commit suicide. You can somewhat sympathise with Sheppard when he says, in the book’s closing line:
“[…] I wish Hercule Poirot had never retired from work and come here to grow vegetable marrows.”
All of these elements, the dispassionate yet austerely moralistic execution of a criminal case with deference to mannered conduct, feel distinctly European in flavour. A product of the Victorian and youth of the Edwardian age, Agatha Christie prioritises strict moral results for upsetting the social order while doing whatever is necessary to maintain it, to avoid what a well-bred woman like Caroline Sheppard might call “unpleasantness”.
In Talking About Detective Fiction, her monograph on the genre, PD James says this about GK Chesterton’s priestly detective Father Brown:
“[…] he is always a rationalist with a dislike of superstition, which he sees as inimical to his faith.”
Similarly, as evidenced thematically by the Mah Jong game which figures in Chapter Sixteen of Ackroyd, pure logic is largely what defines the investigation that Christie lays out for us. Like Father Brown, Poirot is a devout European Catholic, yet he proceeds by virtues associated with the Enlightenment: knowledge, rationality, and rejection of the irrational. (In Chapter Seven, Sheppard remarks upon a “look of respect” in Inspector Raglan’s eye when Poirot demonstrates knowledge by asking a question about fingerprints.)
On the other hand, reading the Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee as translated by Robert van Gulik in 1949, two elements stick out to me above all others: the use of torture as a legitimate means of investigation, and the likewise utilisation of the supernatural such as the interrogation of ghosts, divination practices, and dream symbols. The novel was written by an anonymous Chinese author in the 18th century and is set during China’s medieval period, specifically the Tang dynasty. Interweaving the discovery and investigation of three criminal cases, the structure becomes dramatically dependent on the second, the killing of a shopkeeper by his widow and her subsequent rendering mute of their young daughter (a possible witness) via toxins.
Although I enjoyed the imparting of information about imperial China, its practices and traditions, as well as the picturesque aspects of each case’s resolution, I found it hard to sympathise with county magistrate and de facto detective Dee. His use of the “great torture”, while legally sound at that time, combines with his reliance on spiritualism to make the murderous, abusive widow quite often more sympathetic. When she criticises him for torturing her on the witness of a ghost (her husband, whose spirit Dee is said to have interpreted), I find myself seeing her point.
Possibly due to van Gulik recognising problems like this, the translation works hard to justify Dee as an intelligent and conscientious man, but for me, it does not quite work. I keep imagining how a modern audience would respond if, say, a latter-day Sherlock Holmes forced suspects to kneel on hot chains; separated their joints on a cross; or, as in the amusing and clever but still sadomasochistic-ally cruel denouement of the widow’s story, dressed up as a demon to bully confession from her in her pain-addled state.
Of course, I do not wish to perpetuate false continental and racialist notions of degrees of civility between cultures. Medieval Asia was no more brutal than Europe in that same span. The difference comes down to genre. van Gulik himself admits in his translator’s preface that the Celebrated Cases are somewhat atypical of Chinese crime tales, and that even then he has reshaped the story somewhat to suit modern, European sensibilities. His original continuation novels about Judge Dee would downplay especially the torture aspects, and Chinese crime fiction of the classical period would focus not on investigation so much as detailing backstories before describing trips to the spirit realm, illustrating moral and religious ideas. van Gulik elaborates on this when delineating the peculiar features of Chinese criminal stories in his editor’s preface:
“In the first place, the criminal is, as a rule, introduced formally to the reader at the very beginning of the book, with his full name, an account of his past history, and the motive that led him to commit the crime.”
The only comparisons I can think of in Western detective stories are those of the “inverted” type, such as Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) - wherein a group of Classics students kill someone by accident during a bacchanalia and subsequently try to conceal the crime - and the long-running Columbo television show (1968 to 2003), which almost always begins with the killer plotting and/or executing their murderous design. Perhaps significantly, both of these examples are American rather than European, and the term “inverted” itself declares an inversion of the norm; this is not how things are normally done.
The next distinction that van Gulik makes in describing traditional Chinese crime writing states that:
“[…] the Chinese have an innate love for the supernatural. Ghosts and goblins roam freely about in most Chinese detective stories; animals and kitchen utensils deliver testimony in court, and the detective indulges occasionally in little escapades to the Nether World, to compare notes with the judges of the Chinese Inferno.” [We see a secularised version of this in the previously discussed tricking of the murderous widow with demon disguises.]
Such elements, as van Gulik goes on to state, are either absent from or restrained in the Celebrated Cases, making it relatively atypical of its cultural and periodic genre. This makes it more closely resemble European detective fiction, but in my view, the Cases are still a separate phenomenon with little connective tissue, more a provider of intriguing parallels than an influential ancestor. Evidenced somewhat, I believe, by the thought experiment I alluded to earlier about imagining a later Western detective like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in the Judge Dee role. Even those Western tales set during the medieval period, like the Cadfael chronicles by Edith Pargeter (1977 to 1994), downplay medievalist moral and religious brutalities in favour of reason.
In European detective fiction, ideas of morals and religion are already assumed before the story begins - the pleasure is in following a process of reader puzzlement dependent upon authorial concealment of matters like backstory until the end - while superstition and spiritualism are abandoned altogether at least where the actual investigation is concerned. If the traditional Chinese model is to teach us a hard religious and moral lesson that we might otherwise not heed at our peril, the European has less lofty and noble goals, seeking more to entertain us while reaffirming our preset beliefs and assuaging our anxieties.
In “Death by Hari-Kari in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” by Blake Allmendinger, it is observed:
“Like most mystery writers of her generation, Christie was neither a social critic nor a sceptic regarding human nature. She believed in the fundamental soundness of English civilization and the essential goodness of people. [...] [Her murderers] have standing in society and reputations worth preserving.”
We see here another example of the fundamental difference between the Asian and European traditions of crime tales. Judge Dee is a vehicle of social critique and the Celebrated Cases end with the condemned criminals paraded through the streets to their grisly execution, one of them a noble son with just as much if not a lot more “standing in society” than a simple country doctor like Sheppard ever had.
Yet Sheppard is the one allowed the mercy of hari-kari (ritual suicide) while the nobleman is humiliated and brutalised, since the Chinese tradition is about punishment (detailed executions are a function of the genre), while European detective fiction is more about comfort and relaxation for the reader. If reputations in Christie’s world are worth preserving, in Dee’s they are worth destroying. The detective genre, then, is arguably one rooted in formulas defined by European ideas about it.
These continue into modern American examples. It is a peculiarity of Euro-American detective fiction in the modern era that even when it dips into such disparate genre elements as absurdist comedy and supernatural horror, the underpinning plot must still be worked out via rationale or have some reference to realism. In American director Tim Burton’s reimagining of the legend of Sleepy Hollow (1999), we see a demonic figure stalk and decapitate various pilgrims before returning with his bride to hell through a magic tree. Yet at one point the detective Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp), summoned from the emerging police force in New York to solve these rural murders, says the following:
“The Horseman does the killing but, I believe, at the bidding of a mortal, someone of flesh and blood.”
And from there the “real” murderer is revealed, not the demon but the one who summoned them, a human being with human motives of greed and revenge.
Likewise, in the 21st century John Swartzwelder, the famously reclusive and celebrated American writer behind many of the most well-known episodes of the animated television sitcom The Simpsons (1989 to present), has arguably continued a style started by English novelist Edmund Crispin of traditional detective stories mixed with cartoonish humour. Crispin’s most famous novel, The Moving Toyshop (1946), sees amateur sleuth and Oxford don Gervase Fen solve an incredible case whereby an entire toyshop disappears overnight. Meanwhile, Swartzwelder’s novel The Time Machine Did It (2004), the title an allusion to the famous phrase “the butler did it”, introduces Frank Burly, a parody of “hardboiled” private detectives whose cases take even further the Crispin absurdism, to a degree where they are cartoons in prose.
But while Crispin’s plots are extremely far-fetched and Swartzwelder’s disposable for the sake of a joke, both writers perform a certain deference to the genre’s basis in rationality. Gervase Fen still solves the mystery with what Edgar Allan Poe would have called “ratiocination” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “deductive reasoning”, while Burly still serves the function of a meat-and-potatoes gumshoe, scouring the streets for clues rather than working by magic or divine inspiration. In the following gag from The Time Machine Did It, we see him express disapproval of a client’s eccentricity:
“I made a circular motion with my finger around my temple to indicate I thought this guy was crazy, forgetting that there was no one in the room to see this circular motion except him. He saw it and frowned.”
(You might well wonder what Burly would have made of Judge Dee talking to ghosts and authorising torture on their testimony.) It could be said that the European tradition of rationality and non-supernaturalism in the detective genre has been continued by its US cousins, the descendants of the Old World and its traditions.
Travelling back in time to what TS Eliot called the first and best English detective story, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1865), PD James also categorises it thus in Talking About Detective Fiction:
“[…] if one is to award the distinction of being the first detective story to one single novel, my choice […] would be The Moonstone. […] In my view no other single novel of its type more clearly adumbrates what were to become the main characteristics of the genre.”
Although The Moonstone refers to the supernatural with its invocation of Hindu mythology and mysterious Brahmin priests, its main dramatic thrusts are rooted firmly in material reality. The crime - the theft from a country house of a jewel itself stolen from an Indian shrine - is solved by a process of logical reasoning as well as various perspectives coming together to form a clear picture of what happened and why. Although there is a hint in the subtext that the moonstone’s theft from its rightful resting place leads to calamity, any mystical atmosphere is simply that: atmosphere; and real-world cause-and-effect can be extrapolated by readers. It is not a Hindu deity or spirit world with which the detective must communicate that influences events, as in the older Chinese tradition, but a rational sequence of material events that can be discerned by reason, however mysterious. Hindu beliefs are paid due deference - the Brahmin priests are not punished for their murder of an Englishman and previous assault on another because it is recognised that they operate following a great wrong done to them, compounded by the actions of their victims - but do not have supernatural influence over what happens at least on European shores.
I was a little surprised at first that a character is murdered at the end of the story and that his killers go unpunished, which would seem to violate European tradition in detective stories. But really it conforms to the formula that is, in the last analysis, a European invention. At the end of a traditional detective story, the villain must be arrested or die. The villain of The Moonstone, whose skulduggery leads indirectly to the suicide of a young woman and estrangement of people in love, is punished. Though they serve foreign lands and ideals, the priests are the agents of that punishment as appropriately as if they were Queen Victoria’s personal hangmen.
One oddity specific to the European detective story which ties in with its emphasis on logic and organisation is the detectives' private recreations, which often seem in the English variety to revolve around gardening. Sergeant Cuff of The Moonstone is retiring to grow roses and is so committed to the hobby that he is absent from large amounts of the novel (when wanted by other characters) because he is attending a conference on these flowers and cultivation methods.
A similar plot point helps to define Poirot's character in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Like Sergeant Cuff, he has retired to the country to cultivate plants, in Poirot's case vegetable marrows. In The Moonstone this feels like a fun aspect of Cuff's character with thematic things to say about his worldview and the subtext Collins has inserted.
Gardening is a very English pursuit and also suggests a passion for virtues like symmetry, process, and organisation. We as readers can assume that Cuff’s leisure pursuit is an extension of his professional work, or the drive that inspired it, a passion to arrange elements so that they line up and make sense.
In Ackroyd the pursuit seems almost to be a purposeful ruse so that Poirot can be present in King's Abbott to unpick Dr Sheppard's nefarious deeds, those vegetable marrows even serving as the image that Christie closes on in her final line, quoted earlier. When I first read the book I half-expected there to be a twist where it turns out that Poirot's "retirement" and interest in marrow were just an undercover identity, and that he had been hired by one of the other characters to investigate the strange events afoot. This use of garden cultivation as a thematic element is much more blatant and arguably a great deal clunkier and less naturalistic than in The Moonstone, during which I never questioned the authenticity of Cuff's retirement, or his hobby.
Overall, however, this is not a problem for me with Ackroyd since Christie's strengths lie in a lightness of touch different to the stylistic and thematic density that you find in The Moonstone. I still find the introduction of Poirot amusing, tossing vegetable marrows about and into a nonplussed Dr Sheppard’s garden.
Two years before The Moonstone came out in 1965, Charles Warren Adams authored The Notting Hill Mystery, widely acknowledged as the first detective novel. Superficially it shares some similarities. It is, for one, an epistolary novel, and for another, it largely concerns scandal within a well-to-do Victorian family. It is, however, of a lower order artistically than The Moonstone. Adams was primarily a lawyer and although The Notting Hill Mystery is a fun and brisk read, closer in length (and lightness of touch) to an Agatha Christie than Collins’ doorstop, its problems and characters feel artificial when compared with Collins’ rich Dickensian prose. (It suffers in comparison partially by not having anything like as strong a hook as The Moonstone, whose titular object and its theft are easily grasped even as the story becomes complicated with various perspectives. By contrast, I frequently struggled to grasp what exactly the Notting Hill “mystery” in a nutshell was.) In retrospect, it is like a dry run for the sheer dramatic sweep and scale of The Moonstone, or maybe an amuse-bouche served before a gourmet three-course meal.
When I first started planning this assignment I was determined to focus more on The Moonstone and treat the Celebrated Cases as an interesting footnote, but a funny thing happened when I started to write. I found myself much drawn instead to expounding my thoughts on how the differences between Chinese and European crime tales mark out “detective fiction” as a more Euro-American phenomenon, rather than establishing Wilkie Collins’ novel as the touchstone (if I may pun a little) of that genre. I must confess that I enjoyed The Moonstone more - by an order of magnitude, in fact - but found the Celebrated Cases more interesting as a subject for extended analysis.
To reassemble the major analyses of books that I either read or re-read for this essay, into a linear and chronological ascent illustrating that detective fiction is largely a European invention, we begin with interesting parallels from an 18th-century Asian work (Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee) which nonetheless is ultimately of a different genre serving different expectations.
From there our first real presentiment of what would become the European invention of detective fiction emerged in 1863 with The Notting Hill Mystery, a loose recipe of ingredients that would be developed two years later into the true first example of the genre as we understand it now, The Moonstone.
Skipping forward to the 1920s and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, we find ourselves looking again at a distillation of what we found in The Moonstone, only this time not because we are perceiving a dry run for, but rather a pulpy development of it.
Although Christie deducts Collins’ dense characterisation, rich evocations of setting, and subtle theming, she adds a lightness of touch and cunning ingenuity that would have appealed to travellers at railway bookstores. What links them despite their respective lengths and complexities is their distinctly European materialism, reflected in the use of documents (in Ackroyd it is just one, Sheppard’s manuscript, while Notting Hill and Moonstone both utilise multiple); their rejection of the supernatural (Notting Hill is based partially on the debunking of psychic magic); their prioritising of social decorum and reputation in amongst their shared morality (The Moonstone’s plot is extended in part by characters not being socially able to violate manners by stating how they feel); and finally their sense of fair play, which ties in with the rejection of the supernatural to create a plot that can be anticipated by the reader based on physical details within it.
In “The Guilty Vicarage”, his essay on detective fiction, WH Auden writes:
“In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater contradiction of the murder […] the corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet.”
Auden encapsulates here the entirety of the European invention of detective fiction in how he associates “ritual”, “nature”, and aspects of old religion with material practicality (maps, timetables), and a sense that violence does not belong. A non-European detective like Judge Dee dissociates from nature via rituals rooted not in maps and timetables but in airy mysticism, and very much accepts extreme violence as in line with his medieval reality; his later European colleagues, by comparison, lie on their bellies in the mud, to quote TS Eliot’s “The Hippopotamus”. (Incidentally the name, also taken from Eliot, of a 1994 detective novel by Stephen Fry.) This is because the detective novel is primarily a European invention, its tropes and expectations associated with Enlightenment ideals and notions of fair play from which it is inextricable.
Footnotes
1. Coren, G (2023) "Why Agatha Christie was almost the death of us", The Times and The Sunday Times. Available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-agatha-christie-was-almost-the-death-of-us-lqwk8kjhg
2. Christie, A (2023) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
3. Bloom, H (2002) Agatha Christie: Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
4. James, PD (2011) Talking about Detective Fiction. New York: Vintage Books.
5. Gulik, R van (1976) Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee: An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Chinese Detective Novel. New York: Dover Publications.
6. Allmendinger, B (2021) "Death by Hari-Kari in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd". Available at: https://doi-org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/10.1080/0895769X.2021.1966360
7. Sleepy Hollow (1999) IMDb. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162661/
8. Swartzwelder, J (2004) The Time Machine Did It. Chatsworth, CA: Kennydale Books.
9. Auden, W.H. (Wystan H. et al. (2012) “The Guilty Vicarage”, by W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden, Harper’s Magazine. Available at: https://harpers.org/archive/1948/05/the-guilty-vicarage/
Spoilers for
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (major)
The Moonstone (minor)
In an October 2023 article for The Times, restaurant critic and columnist Giles Coren related his experience of reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926) to his young children, one chapter a night for about a month. Despite referring to “the drear clunk of the prose and “characterisation” based mostly on clothes, accents and facial twitches,” Coren describes his and his family’s enjoyment of the detective elements. That is until the solution is revealed:
“The NARRATOR?” screamed [Coren’s son], leaping off the bed and storming round the room. “The goddam NARRATOR? That is shit, dad! That is so shit! I’ve given a month of my life to that stupid book and she plays a cheap-arse trick? Dr Sheppard narrated the whole stupid story without telling us it was him? It means every page was a lie! The whole book is a con!”
This personal anecdote is a useful highlight of how much our understanding of detective fiction is based on rules of fair play, to the point of enraging readers who feel as though their time has been wasted if certain “rules” are broken. The essay that follows will explore the idea that detective fiction is primarily a European invention by expanding on these ideas of rules and fair play as well as other defining tropes. This exploration will be related to a selection of texts, from 18th century China to recent America, illuminating how aspects of reason, materialism, and civilised justice are fundamental to Europe's detective literature and therefore its US cousins'. And, finally, modern readers' conception of "detective fiction" as a genre, regardless of place and period.
When I first read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd some time ago, the thing that struck me about how it ended was how neat it is, almost comedically so. I already knew the killer’s identity by the same cultural osmosis that let me know who “Mrs Bates” in Psycho (1960) and Luke Skywalker’s father in Star Wars (1977) were, so I was reading more to see how Christie executed it. If you were to watch the ITV adaptation starring David Suchet as Poirot (from Agatha Christie's Poirot, 1989 to 2013) you might think that Christie’s ending was much the same, with Dr Sheppard ranting about his justness in killing Mrs Ferrars while Caroline (his sister) weeps decorously. But this scene of high emotion is far removed from Christie’s, wherein only Poirot and Sheppard are present, and Poirot graciously allows Sheppard to commit suicide so that his sister need not know and feel disgraced:
“I can trust [Poirot]. He and Inspector Raglan will manage it between them. I should not like Caroline to know.”
The logistics of this feel staggering. Poirot and Raglan are supposed to connive with a murderer to conceal his crime, also coming up with a convenient excuse for his suicide, all while staving off questions from Ackroyd’s family about why their patriarch’s killer is not facing trial, merely so that they might spare Caroline’s feelings?
The bizarre and passionless neat-and-tidiness here is amusing in a modern context, where we expect a degree of emotion from such matters as murder and suicide, but also oddly chilly. It gives Poirot a faintly predatory air, and although aside from its unorthodox solution The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a traditional Golden Age detective story, it allows us to grasp as few others do the feeling of someone being entrapped by a great detective.
In his introduction to a collection of Modern Critical Views, part of a series in his name, literary critic Harold Bloom says of Dr Sheppard:
“[His] dryness conceals not well-bred malice, but something that approximates nihilism. […] his silences are the most eloquent part of him. […] Dr Sheppard kills as a reflex of his own nature: his guilt is never to be doubted, least of all by himself, though his craft as narrator is to admit nothing until the end.”
He is a predator who, in a sense, is caught and killed by another and more ingenious predator in Poirot. The detective holds him close and recruits him as his sidekick exclusively to spring a trap on him at last and force him to commit suicide. You can somewhat sympathise with Sheppard when he says, in the book’s closing line:
“[…] I wish Hercule Poirot had never retired from work and come here to grow vegetable marrows.”
All of these elements, the dispassionate yet austerely moralistic execution of a criminal case with deference to mannered conduct, feel distinctly European in flavour. A product of the Victorian and youth of the Edwardian age, Agatha Christie prioritises strict moral results for upsetting the social order while doing whatever is necessary to maintain it, to avoid what a well-bred woman like Caroline Sheppard might call “unpleasantness”.
In Talking About Detective Fiction, her monograph on the genre, PD James says this about GK Chesterton’s priestly detective Father Brown:
“[…] he is always a rationalist with a dislike of superstition, which he sees as inimical to his faith.”
Similarly, as evidenced thematically by the Mah Jong game which figures in Chapter Sixteen of Ackroyd, pure logic is largely what defines the investigation that Christie lays out for us. Like Father Brown, Poirot is a devout European Catholic, yet he proceeds by virtues associated with the Enlightenment: knowledge, rationality, and rejection of the irrational. (In Chapter Seven, Sheppard remarks upon a “look of respect” in Inspector Raglan’s eye when Poirot demonstrates knowledge by asking a question about fingerprints.)
On the other hand, reading the Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee as translated by Robert van Gulik in 1949, two elements stick out to me above all others: the use of torture as a legitimate means of investigation, and the likewise utilisation of the supernatural such as the interrogation of ghosts, divination practices, and dream symbols. The novel was written by an anonymous Chinese author in the 18th century and is set during China’s medieval period, specifically the Tang dynasty. Interweaving the discovery and investigation of three criminal cases, the structure becomes dramatically dependent on the second, the killing of a shopkeeper by his widow and her subsequent rendering mute of their young daughter (a possible witness) via toxins.
Although I enjoyed the imparting of information about imperial China, its practices and traditions, as well as the picturesque aspects of each case’s resolution, I found it hard to sympathise with county magistrate and de facto detective Dee. His use of the “great torture”, while legally sound at that time, combines with his reliance on spiritualism to make the murderous, abusive widow quite often more sympathetic. When she criticises him for torturing her on the witness of a ghost (her husband, whose spirit Dee is said to have interpreted), I find myself seeing her point.
Possibly due to van Gulik recognising problems like this, the translation works hard to justify Dee as an intelligent and conscientious man, but for me, it does not quite work. I keep imagining how a modern audience would respond if, say, a latter-day Sherlock Holmes forced suspects to kneel on hot chains; separated their joints on a cross; or, as in the amusing and clever but still sadomasochistic-ally cruel denouement of the widow’s story, dressed up as a demon to bully confession from her in her pain-addled state.
Of course, I do not wish to perpetuate false continental and racialist notions of degrees of civility between cultures. Medieval Asia was no more brutal than Europe in that same span. The difference comes down to genre. van Gulik himself admits in his translator’s preface that the Celebrated Cases are somewhat atypical of Chinese crime tales, and that even then he has reshaped the story somewhat to suit modern, European sensibilities. His original continuation novels about Judge Dee would downplay especially the torture aspects, and Chinese crime fiction of the classical period would focus not on investigation so much as detailing backstories before describing trips to the spirit realm, illustrating moral and religious ideas. van Gulik elaborates on this when delineating the peculiar features of Chinese criminal stories in his editor’s preface:
“In the first place, the criminal is, as a rule, introduced formally to the reader at the very beginning of the book, with his full name, an account of his past history, and the motive that led him to commit the crime.”
The only comparisons I can think of in Western detective stories are those of the “inverted” type, such as Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) - wherein a group of Classics students kill someone by accident during a bacchanalia and subsequently try to conceal the crime - and the long-running Columbo television show (1968 to 2003), which almost always begins with the killer plotting and/or executing their murderous design. Perhaps significantly, both of these examples are American rather than European, and the term “inverted” itself declares an inversion of the norm; this is not how things are normally done.
The next distinction that van Gulik makes in describing traditional Chinese crime writing states that:
“[…] the Chinese have an innate love for the supernatural. Ghosts and goblins roam freely about in most Chinese detective stories; animals and kitchen utensils deliver testimony in court, and the detective indulges occasionally in little escapades to the Nether World, to compare notes with the judges of the Chinese Inferno.” [We see a secularised version of this in the previously discussed tricking of the murderous widow with demon disguises.]
Such elements, as van Gulik goes on to state, are either absent from or restrained in the Celebrated Cases, making it relatively atypical of its cultural and periodic genre. This makes it more closely resemble European detective fiction, but in my view, the Cases are still a separate phenomenon with little connective tissue, more a provider of intriguing parallels than an influential ancestor. Evidenced somewhat, I believe, by the thought experiment I alluded to earlier about imagining a later Western detective like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in the Judge Dee role. Even those Western tales set during the medieval period, like the Cadfael chronicles by Edith Pargeter (1977 to 1994), downplay medievalist moral and religious brutalities in favour of reason.
In European detective fiction, ideas of morals and religion are already assumed before the story begins - the pleasure is in following a process of reader puzzlement dependent upon authorial concealment of matters like backstory until the end - while superstition and spiritualism are abandoned altogether at least where the actual investigation is concerned. If the traditional Chinese model is to teach us a hard religious and moral lesson that we might otherwise not heed at our peril, the European has less lofty and noble goals, seeking more to entertain us while reaffirming our preset beliefs and assuaging our anxieties.
In “Death by Hari-Kari in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” by Blake Allmendinger, it is observed:
“Like most mystery writers of her generation, Christie was neither a social critic nor a sceptic regarding human nature. She believed in the fundamental soundness of English civilization and the essential goodness of people. [...] [Her murderers] have standing in society and reputations worth preserving.”
We see here another example of the fundamental difference between the Asian and European traditions of crime tales. Judge Dee is a vehicle of social critique and the Celebrated Cases end with the condemned criminals paraded through the streets to their grisly execution, one of them a noble son with just as much if not a lot more “standing in society” than a simple country doctor like Sheppard ever had.
Yet Sheppard is the one allowed the mercy of hari-kari (ritual suicide) while the nobleman is humiliated and brutalised, since the Chinese tradition is about punishment (detailed executions are a function of the genre), while European detective fiction is more about comfort and relaxation for the reader. If reputations in Christie’s world are worth preserving, in Dee’s they are worth destroying. The detective genre, then, is arguably one rooted in formulas defined by European ideas about it.
These continue into modern American examples. It is a peculiarity of Euro-American detective fiction in the modern era that even when it dips into such disparate genre elements as absurdist comedy and supernatural horror, the underpinning plot must still be worked out via rationale or have some reference to realism. In American director Tim Burton’s reimagining of the legend of Sleepy Hollow (1999), we see a demonic figure stalk and decapitate various pilgrims before returning with his bride to hell through a magic tree. Yet at one point the detective Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp), summoned from the emerging police force in New York to solve these rural murders, says the following:
“The Horseman does the killing but, I believe, at the bidding of a mortal, someone of flesh and blood.”
And from there the “real” murderer is revealed, not the demon but the one who summoned them, a human being with human motives of greed and revenge.
Likewise, in the 21st century John Swartzwelder, the famously reclusive and celebrated American writer behind many of the most well-known episodes of the animated television sitcom The Simpsons (1989 to present), has arguably continued a style started by English novelist Edmund Crispin of traditional detective stories mixed with cartoonish humour. Crispin’s most famous novel, The Moving Toyshop (1946), sees amateur sleuth and Oxford don Gervase Fen solve an incredible case whereby an entire toyshop disappears overnight. Meanwhile, Swartzwelder’s novel The Time Machine Did It (2004), the title an allusion to the famous phrase “the butler did it”, introduces Frank Burly, a parody of “hardboiled” private detectives whose cases take even further the Crispin absurdism, to a degree where they are cartoons in prose.
But while Crispin’s plots are extremely far-fetched and Swartzwelder’s disposable for the sake of a joke, both writers perform a certain deference to the genre’s basis in rationality. Gervase Fen still solves the mystery with what Edgar Allan Poe would have called “ratiocination” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “deductive reasoning”, while Burly still serves the function of a meat-and-potatoes gumshoe, scouring the streets for clues rather than working by magic or divine inspiration. In the following gag from The Time Machine Did It, we see him express disapproval of a client’s eccentricity:
“I made a circular motion with my finger around my temple to indicate I thought this guy was crazy, forgetting that there was no one in the room to see this circular motion except him. He saw it and frowned.”
(You might well wonder what Burly would have made of Judge Dee talking to ghosts and authorising torture on their testimony.) It could be said that the European tradition of rationality and non-supernaturalism in the detective genre has been continued by its US cousins, the descendants of the Old World and its traditions.
Travelling back in time to what TS Eliot called the first and best English detective story, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1865), PD James also categorises it thus in Talking About Detective Fiction:
“[…] if one is to award the distinction of being the first detective story to one single novel, my choice […] would be The Moonstone. […] In my view no other single novel of its type more clearly adumbrates what were to become the main characteristics of the genre.”
Although The Moonstone refers to the supernatural with its invocation of Hindu mythology and mysterious Brahmin priests, its main dramatic thrusts are rooted firmly in material reality. The crime - the theft from a country house of a jewel itself stolen from an Indian shrine - is solved by a process of logical reasoning as well as various perspectives coming together to form a clear picture of what happened and why. Although there is a hint in the subtext that the moonstone’s theft from its rightful resting place leads to calamity, any mystical atmosphere is simply that: atmosphere; and real-world cause-and-effect can be extrapolated by readers. It is not a Hindu deity or spirit world with which the detective must communicate that influences events, as in the older Chinese tradition, but a rational sequence of material events that can be discerned by reason, however mysterious. Hindu beliefs are paid due deference - the Brahmin priests are not punished for their murder of an Englishman and previous assault on another because it is recognised that they operate following a great wrong done to them, compounded by the actions of their victims - but do not have supernatural influence over what happens at least on European shores.
I was a little surprised at first that a character is murdered at the end of the story and that his killers go unpunished, which would seem to violate European tradition in detective stories. But really it conforms to the formula that is, in the last analysis, a European invention. At the end of a traditional detective story, the villain must be arrested or die. The villain of The Moonstone, whose skulduggery leads indirectly to the suicide of a young woman and estrangement of people in love, is punished. Though they serve foreign lands and ideals, the priests are the agents of that punishment as appropriately as if they were Queen Victoria’s personal hangmen.
One oddity specific to the European detective story which ties in with its emphasis on logic and organisation is the detectives' private recreations, which often seem in the English variety to revolve around gardening. Sergeant Cuff of The Moonstone is retiring to grow roses and is so committed to the hobby that he is absent from large amounts of the novel (when wanted by other characters) because he is attending a conference on these flowers and cultivation methods.
A similar plot point helps to define Poirot's character in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Like Sergeant Cuff, he has retired to the country to cultivate plants, in Poirot's case vegetable marrows. In The Moonstone this feels like a fun aspect of Cuff's character with thematic things to say about his worldview and the subtext Collins has inserted.
Gardening is a very English pursuit and also suggests a passion for virtues like symmetry, process, and organisation. We as readers can assume that Cuff’s leisure pursuit is an extension of his professional work, or the drive that inspired it, a passion to arrange elements so that they line up and make sense.
In Ackroyd the pursuit seems almost to be a purposeful ruse so that Poirot can be present in King's Abbott to unpick Dr Sheppard's nefarious deeds, those vegetable marrows even serving as the image that Christie closes on in her final line, quoted earlier. When I first read the book I half-expected there to be a twist where it turns out that Poirot's "retirement" and interest in marrow were just an undercover identity, and that he had been hired by one of the other characters to investigate the strange events afoot. This use of garden cultivation as a thematic element is much more blatant and arguably a great deal clunkier and less naturalistic than in The Moonstone, during which I never questioned the authenticity of Cuff's retirement, or his hobby.
Overall, however, this is not a problem for me with Ackroyd since Christie's strengths lie in a lightness of touch different to the stylistic and thematic density that you find in The Moonstone. I still find the introduction of Poirot amusing, tossing vegetable marrows about and into a nonplussed Dr Sheppard’s garden.
Two years before The Moonstone came out in 1965, Charles Warren Adams authored The Notting Hill Mystery, widely acknowledged as the first detective novel. Superficially it shares some similarities. It is, for one, an epistolary novel, and for another, it largely concerns scandal within a well-to-do Victorian family. It is, however, of a lower order artistically than The Moonstone. Adams was primarily a lawyer and although The Notting Hill Mystery is a fun and brisk read, closer in length (and lightness of touch) to an Agatha Christie than Collins’ doorstop, its problems and characters feel artificial when compared with Collins’ rich Dickensian prose. (It suffers in comparison partially by not having anything like as strong a hook as The Moonstone, whose titular object and its theft are easily grasped even as the story becomes complicated with various perspectives. By contrast, I frequently struggled to grasp what exactly the Notting Hill “mystery” in a nutshell was.) In retrospect, it is like a dry run for the sheer dramatic sweep and scale of The Moonstone, or maybe an amuse-bouche served before a gourmet three-course meal.
When I first started planning this assignment I was determined to focus more on The Moonstone and treat the Celebrated Cases as an interesting footnote, but a funny thing happened when I started to write. I found myself much drawn instead to expounding my thoughts on how the differences between Chinese and European crime tales mark out “detective fiction” as a more Euro-American phenomenon, rather than establishing Wilkie Collins’ novel as the touchstone (if I may pun a little) of that genre. I must confess that I enjoyed The Moonstone more - by an order of magnitude, in fact - but found the Celebrated Cases more interesting as a subject for extended analysis.
To reassemble the major analyses of books that I either read or re-read for this essay, into a linear and chronological ascent illustrating that detective fiction is largely a European invention, we begin with interesting parallels from an 18th-century Asian work (Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee) which nonetheless is ultimately of a different genre serving different expectations.
From there our first real presentiment of what would become the European invention of detective fiction emerged in 1863 with The Notting Hill Mystery, a loose recipe of ingredients that would be developed two years later into the true first example of the genre as we understand it now, The Moonstone.
Skipping forward to the 1920s and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, we find ourselves looking again at a distillation of what we found in The Moonstone, only this time not because we are perceiving a dry run for, but rather a pulpy development of it.
Although Christie deducts Collins’ dense characterisation, rich evocations of setting, and subtle theming, she adds a lightness of touch and cunning ingenuity that would have appealed to travellers at railway bookstores. What links them despite their respective lengths and complexities is their distinctly European materialism, reflected in the use of documents (in Ackroyd it is just one, Sheppard’s manuscript, while Notting Hill and Moonstone both utilise multiple); their rejection of the supernatural (Notting Hill is based partially on the debunking of psychic magic); their prioritising of social decorum and reputation in amongst their shared morality (The Moonstone’s plot is extended in part by characters not being socially able to violate manners by stating how they feel); and finally their sense of fair play, which ties in with the rejection of the supernatural to create a plot that can be anticipated by the reader based on physical details within it.
In “The Guilty Vicarage”, his essay on detective fiction, WH Auden writes:
“In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater contradiction of the murder […] the corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet.”
Auden encapsulates here the entirety of the European invention of detective fiction in how he associates “ritual”, “nature”, and aspects of old religion with material practicality (maps, timetables), and a sense that violence does not belong. A non-European detective like Judge Dee dissociates from nature via rituals rooted not in maps and timetables but in airy mysticism, and very much accepts extreme violence as in line with his medieval reality; his later European colleagues, by comparison, lie on their bellies in the mud, to quote TS Eliot’s “The Hippopotamus”. (Incidentally the name, also taken from Eliot, of a 1994 detective novel by Stephen Fry.) This is because the detective novel is primarily a European invention, its tropes and expectations associated with Enlightenment ideals and notions of fair play from which it is inextricable.
Footnotes
1. Coren, G (2023) "Why Agatha Christie was almost the death of us", The Times and The Sunday Times. Available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-agatha-christie-was-almost-the-death-of-us-lqwk8kjhg
2. Christie, A (2023) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
3. Bloom, H (2002) Agatha Christie: Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
4. James, PD (2011) Talking about Detective Fiction. New York: Vintage Books.
5. Gulik, R van (1976) Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee: An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Chinese Detective Novel. New York: Dover Publications.
6. Allmendinger, B (2021) "Death by Hari-Kari in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd". Available at: https://doi-org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/10.1080/0895769X.2021.1966360
7. Sleepy Hollow (1999) IMDb. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162661/
8. Swartzwelder, J (2004) The Time Machine Did It. Chatsworth, CA: Kennydale Books.
9. Auden, W.H. (Wystan H. et al. (2012) “The Guilty Vicarage”, by W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden, Harper’s Magazine. Available at: https://harpers.org/archive/1948/05/the-guilty-vicarage/
Published 14th Dec 2023
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Picture from: https://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Classics-Collection-Detective-Christmas/dp/9124095478
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14th Dec 2023 11:51pm
and I’d just add that in Dorothy L Sayer’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Wimsey leaves the poor sod with a gun, to end it all with, what I’d always considered a very British sense, of tidiness ..
15th Dec 2023 00:00am
