The Detective Novel

S. S. VAN DINE

Description

Delve into the intricate world of the crime fiction genre as S. S. Van Dine provides an in-depth analysis and critique of what makes a great detective story.

In this essay, S. S. Van Dine examines the various elements that make a brilliant detective novel, including plot, characterisation, and setting. Exploring the works of famous detective novelists such as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G. K. Chesterton, Van Dine provides insights into the styles, techniques, and themes used by these writers.

First published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1926 under Van Dine’s pseudonym, Willard Huntington Wright, The Detective Novel provides a comprehensive overview of the genre. Whether you're a seasoned reader of detective novels or a newcomer to the genre, this essay offers an engaging and thought-provoking look at one of the most popular and enduring forms of fiction.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Detective
• Mystery

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 19 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781528798648
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE DETECTIVE NOVEL
AN ESSAY ON GREAT DETECTIVE STORIES
By
S. S. VAN DINE

First published in 1926



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"Sweet Analytics, ‘tis thou hast ravished me."
—Do ctor Faustus


Contents
S. S. Van Dine
THE DET ECTIVE NOVEL
An Essay by S. S. Van Dine




S. S. Van Dine
S. S. Van Dine was born Willard Huntington Wright in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1888. He attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College and Harvard University, but failed to graduate, leaving to cultivate contacts he had made in the lite rary world.
At the age of twenty-one, Wright began his professional writing career as literary editor of the Los Angeles Times . Between 1912 and 1914, he edited the New York literary magazine The Smart Set , and in 1915 he published his philosophical study, What Nietzsche Taught . A year later, he produced a naturalistic novel, The Man of Promise (1916). He followed this with Misinforming a Nation , in which he mounted a scathing attack on alleged inaccuracies and English biases in the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleve nth Edition.
Wright continued writing as a critic and journalist until 1923, when he became ill from an ailment that was labeled as overwork, but was in reality a secret drug addiction, according to his biographers. His doctor confined him to bed (supposedly because of a heart ailment, but actually because of a cocaine dependency) for more than two years. In frustration and boredom, Wright began collecting and studying thousands of volumes of crime and detection. This study paid off: in 1926, Wright published his first S. S. Van Dine novel, The Benson Murder Case .
Wright went on to write eleven more mysteries. The first few books about his upper-class amateur sleuth, Philo Vance, were so popular that Wright became wealthy for the first time in his life. The title of an article Wright produced at the height of his fame, entitled 'I used to be a Highbrow and Look at Me Now', reflected both his pleasure, and his regret that he was no longer regarded seriously as a writer.
His later books declined in popularity as the reading public's tastes in mystery fiction changed, but during the late twenties and early thirties his work was very successful. In addition to his fiction, Wright's lengthy introduction and notes to the anthology The World's Great Detective Stories (1928) remain important in the history of the critical study of detective fiction. Wright also penned an article 'Twenty rules for writing detective stories' (1928) for The American Magazine , which continues to be reprinted to this day
During the thirties, Wright wrote a series of short stories for Warner Brothers film studio. He died in 1939 in New York City, aged fifty.


THE DETEC TIVE NOVEL
An Essay by S. S. Van Dine
I
There is a tendency among modern critics to gauge all novels by a single literary standard—a standard, in fact, which should be applied only to novels that patently seek a niche among the enduring works of imaginative letters. That all novels do not aspire to such exalted company is obvious; and it is manifestly unfair to judge them by a standard their creators deliberately ignored. Novels of sheer entertainment belong in a different category from those written for purposes of intellectual and æsthetic stimulation; for they are fabricated in a spirit of evanescent diversion, and avoid all the deeper conc erns of art.
The novel designed purely for entertainment and the literary novel spring, in the main, from quite different impulses. Their objectives have almost nothing in common. The mental attitudes underlying them are antipathetic: one is frankly superficial, the other sedulously profound. They achieve diametrically opposed results; and their appeals are psychologically unrelated; in fact, they are unable to fulfil each other's function; and the reader who, at different times, can enjoy both without intellectual conflict, can never substitute the one for the other. Any attempt to measure them by the same rules is as inconsistent as to criticize a vaudeville performance and the plays of Shakespeare from the same point of view, or to hold a musical comedy to the standards by which we estimate the foremost grand opera. Even Schnitzler's Anatol may not be approached in the same critical frame of mind that one brings to Hauptmann's The Weavers ; and if The Mikado or Pinafore were held strictly to the musical canons of Parsifal or Die Meistersinger , they would suffer unjustly. In the graphic arts the same principle holds. Forain and Degas are not to be judged by the æsthetic criteria we apply to Michelangelo's drawings and the painting s of Rubens.
There are four distinct varieties of the "popular," or "light," novel—to wit: the romantic novel (dealing with young love, and ending generally either at the hymeneal altar or with a prenuptial embrace); the novel of adventure (in which physical action and danger are the chief constituents: sea stories, wild-west yarns, odysseys of the African wilds, etc.); the mystery novel (wherein much of the dramatic suspense is produced by hidden forces that are not revealed until the denouement: novels of diplomatic intrigue, international plottings, secret societies, crime, pseudoscience, specters, and the like); and the detective novel. These types often overlap in content, and at times become so intermingled in subject-matter that one is not quite sure in which category they primarily belong. But though they may borrow devices and appeals from one another, and usurp one another's distinctive material, they follow, in the main, their own special subject, and evolve within their own boundaries.
Of these four kinds of literary entertainment the detective novel is the youngest, the most complicated, the most difficult of construction, and the most distinct. It is, in fact, almost sui generis, and, except in its more general structural characteristics, has little in common with its fellows—the romantic, the adventurous, and the mystery novel. In one sense, to be sure, it is a highly specialized offshoot of the last named; but the relationship is far more distant than the average read er imagines.
II
If we are to understand the unique place held in modern letters by the detective novel, we must first endeavor to determine its peculiar appeal: for this appeal is fundamentally unrelated to that of any other variety of fictional entertainment. What, then, constitutes the hold that the detective novel has on all classes of people—even those who would not stoop to read any other kind of "popular" fiction? Why do we find men of high cultural attainments—college professors, statesmen, scientists, philosophers, and men concerned with the graver, more advanced, more intellectual problems of life—passing by all other varieties of bestseller novels, and going to the detective story for diversion and relaxation?
The answer, I believe, is simply this: the detective novel does not fall under the head of fiction in the ordinary sense, but belongs rather in the category of riddles: it is, in fact, a complicated and extended puzzle cast in fictional form. Its widespread popularity and interest are due, at bottom and in essence, to the same factors that give popularity and interest to the cross-word puzzle. Indeed, the structure and mechanism of the cross-word puzzle and of the detective novel are very similar. In each there is a problem to be solved; and the solution depends wholly on mental processes—on analysis, on the fitting together of apparently unrelated parts, on a knowledge of the ingredients, and, in some measure, on guessing. Each is supplied with a series of overlapping clues to guide the solver; and these clues, when fitted into place, blaze the path for future progress. In each, when the final solution is achieved, all the details are found to be woven into a complete, interrelated, and closely kni tted fabric.
There is confirmatory evidence of the mechanical impulse that inspires the true detective novel when we consider what might almost be called the dominant intellectual penchant of its inventor.