Remember when you were a kid and on the first day of school the teacher would have you write your first assignment on “What I Did Over My Summer Vacation”? Okay, well my teachers did and I usually just tried to make up anything that sounded better than “I stayed home and watched reruns of Gilligan’s Island all day.”
This summer, in addition to a couple of long family vacations, I also did a study of the history of mystery. While reading a book on writing I came across another called Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. Written by Julian Symons it is a fascinating history of the development of mystery as a genre. Using Symons’ book as a guide, and some other resources I came across, I did some fun research on the historical development of writing mysteries. Not only did this study broaden my perspective on the genre I am writing in, but it also helped me see my own novel as a blend of both the Golden Age of Mysteries and the period of the Hard-Boiled Private Eye. You’ll see what I mean in just a bit.
In the meantime, here are ten cool (I think they’re cool) take-aways from some of the research I did over the summer on the history of mystery.
1. Edgar Allan Poe is considered the first American writer of mystery and detective stories.
Best known for writing horror stories, such as “The Pit and the Pendulum”, Poe also dabbled just briefly in the writing of mystery. He wrote three short stories from 1841 to 1845, the first being “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. Poe’s main character in each of these stories is a detective named C. Auguste Dupin who has been studied by many scholars as the main influencer in the development of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Each year the Mystery Writers of America awards the “Edgar Award” to the best new mystery fiction of the previous year.
2. Detective writing became American with the introduction of the Hard-Boiled Private Eye
Prior to the introduction of characters such as Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, the quintessential detective was one fashioned from the minds of British mystery writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. The British detective always seemed to stumble upon a mystery at a beautiful country manor, and after gathering all of the evidence, and using just his intellect, would perfectly fit together the clues like puzzle pieces just before nabbing the killer. In 1930 that all changed in America when Hammett published The Maltese Falcon and introduced a whole new breed of crime fighter, the hard-boiled private eye, who used his fists first and his mind second. And he wasn’t solving murders in beautiful country estates but in the back alleys of New York City and San Francisco. So popular was this new breed of mystery that it spawned a whole new and very American kind of movie genre known as Film Noir. The Hard-Boiled Private Eye is truly an American contribution to the history of mystery.
3. Jacques Futrelle was an accomplished writer of mystery and a hero on board the RMS Titanic
Futrelle held from Georgia and had become a very accomplished writer of mysteries in the early 20th century when he and his family decided to take a fateful trip aboard the very new and very impressive ocean liner, the RMS Titanic. Needless to say, the voyage didn’t go as planned, and even though Futrelle had a first-class ticket and could have been one of the first to board the life boats, he refused, giving his seat to another. He put his wife and their child in a lifeboat and the last time she saw him he was smoking a cigarette on the deck. His body was never recovered.
4. Charles Dickens also wrote a couple of mystery novels … and one was in progress when he died.
Not known primarily as a writer of detective novels, Dickens nevertheless tried his hand at it and more than once. His first and most significant mystery is Bleak House, written in 1853. When he died he left behind an unfinished mystery manuscript, The Mystery of Edmund Drood. The killer is never identified in the book and readers have had fun through the years looking at the clues and speculating who Dickens had chosen to be the culprit.
5. Winnie the Pooh’s author, A A Milne, wrote one mystery.
This one really surprised me. Known mostly for writing about the adventures of a Bear called Pooh, Milne also wrote a novel entitled The Red House Mystery in 1922. It was not well received at the time but today is more highly acclaimed when seen in the broader context of the history of mystery.
6. In the 1920s the largest group of readers of mystery were women, which is why so many women, including Agatha Christie, began to write them.
The most well-known of the writers of the Golden Age of Mystery is of course Agatha Christie. And it’s no accident that she quickly rose to prominence. In the 1920s many stay at home wives and mothers soon found themselves with a little extra money and a little extra time and spent both on reading about murder. You know the old saying, write what you want to read, and that’s just what many women began to do. In addition to Christie, some of these Queens of Crime included Elizabeth Daly, Mary Roberts Rhinehard, and Josephine Tey.
7. There were several attempts during the Golden Age of Mystery to formulize what a mystery novel should look like … and everyone broke the rules.
As mystery novels became popular during the 20s and 30s there were several attempts by writers of the fiction to normalize the standards of mystery writing. Ronald Knox, who wasn’t just a writer of mystery but a theologian as well, penned ten rules by which every murder mystery should abide. “Not more than one secret passage or room” and “the detective himself must not commit the crime” are a few of the obligations of the writer according to Knox. His most curious rule is number five in which he says, “no Chinaman must figure into the story.” Perhaps he wasn’t a fan of the immensely popular Charlie Chan detective novels. Some say he wrote the rules tongue in cheek. Who knows. You can read the entire list by going to https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/tips-masters/ronald-knox-10-commandments-of-detective-fiction. Another writer S S Van Dine put together his own list of rules with twenty requirements. You can read Van Dine’s list by going to http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/triv288.html.
8. Pulp Fiction got its nickname because it was cheap … cheap to make,cheap to buy, and a very cheap read … if you know what I mean!
From the last part of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th, readers who found themselves at a drug store or the train station or just about anywhere a counter was available for a small magazine rack, able to afford and enjoy any numerous cheap magazines that soon became known as “pulp fiction”. The nickname derived from the kind of cheap paper the magazines were printed on, pulp wood. The stories were even cheaper and often pictured very scandalous scenes on the cover that may or may not have anything to do with the short stories inside. One of the most popular of the pulp magazines was The Black Mask in which many of the early writers of the hard-boiled detective stories got their first start, including Dashiell Hammett and his detective The Continental Op.
9. The public wouldn’t let Sir Arthur Conan Doyle murder the world’s most famous detective … but he did try
After two series of short stories that were eventually published as two separate collections, Doyle, tired of his infamous detective, sent him and his nemesis Moriarty over a waterfall never to heard from again. It is said that Doyle then felt a huge sigh of relief. He had come to hate his own creation and wanted an end to him. The public wouldn’t have it and eight years later Doyle revived the detective with one of his best novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles. The author never tried to kill off Holmes again. I guess he figured out which side his bread was buttered and like it or not he and Sherlock were to be tied together for the remainder of his life.
10. Agatha Christie died on my 10th birthday ... that's not creepy!
So, this one has no real significance for anyone but me … unless you happen to have been born on January 12th. Incidentally, the day she died I received my first two Hardy Boy mystery novels for my birthday, Coincidence?! Yeah, it probably is!
