Detective fiction

“ There you have it, the problem—the detective story. Now why the fascination? I’ll tell you. It appeals to our curiosity, yes—but deeper to a sort of intellectual vanity. Here are six matches, arrange them to make four squares; five men present, a theft takes place—who’s the thief? Who will guess it first? Whose brain will show its superior cleverness—see? That’s all—that’s all there is to it.”
“Out of all of which,” said De Gollyer, “the interesting thing is that Rankin has supplied the reason why the supply of detective fiction is inexhaustible. It does all come down to the simplest terms. ”

“ Detectives of the Sherlock Holmes type exist only in fiction, and although it goes without saying that powers of observation above the ordinary, and an intimate knowledge of men are indispensable in a detective, it is equally indispensable that a detective, as things are, must rely upon information if he wishes successfully to solve any problem of crime. ”

“ We are told that "all the world loves a lover," and it is, perhaps, equally true that most people like to read the details of clever detective exploits. The deeds of criminals naturally awaken the emotions of horror, fear, curiosity and awe in proportion to their heinousness and the mystery by which they are enveloped. Consequently the detective officer who pierces the mystery—unravels it thread by thread, and by unerring sagacity penetrates its innermost depths and lays his hand on the criminal—is at once invested, in the popular mind, with qualities approaching the preternatural. ”

“ To write a story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of committing it. To persons of somewhat weak sensibility this is natural enough; it must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of sensational crime as one of Shakespeare's plays.
There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent of the public weal. ”

“ The revelation of the crime, the obscurity of the victims, the length of time elapsing between the perpetration and the discovery, the mystery enveloping the deed with an apparently impregnable mantle, and the swift following detection and apprehension of the perpetrators, all combine to form the basis for one of the most interesting narratives ever found in criminal or detective literature. ”

“ The title of the next volume of The New Magnet Library, No. 836, is “The Heart of the Underworld,” by Nicholas Carter. The story leads you through dark and devious ways of crime, through a labyrinth of mystery and apparent defeat, out upon the broad highway of justice—where crime is punished and wrongs are righted. The great detective is the guide through this maze, and those who follow him in his perilous adventures will find themselves thrilled from start to finish. ”

“ There was a time when I began to write a detective story for myself. My murder, I thought, was rather cleverly carried out. The villain sent a letter to his victim, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope for an answer. The gum of the envelope was poisoned. I did not know, nor did I bother to find out, whether it was possible, but this, as I said just now, is the beauty of writing a detective story. If there is no such quick-working poison, then you invent one. ”

“ The detective or mystery tale, in which this last book is an experiment, involves in itself a problem for the artist, as odd as any of the problems which it puts to the policeman. A detective story might well be in a special sense a spiritual tragedy; since it is a story in which even the moral sympathies may be in doubt. A police romance is almost the only romance in which the hero may turn out to be the villain, or the villain to be the hero. ”

“ Nay, gentlemen, I need not ask you to imagine it. You were a part of the community. It came to you in your daily avocations, it sent a thrill through your beings and you felt that life was not secure. Every man turned detective. Every act and fact and thought that occurred to the thousand, to the million men all over the United States, was spread abroad and furnished and given for the identification of the criminal, and still it remained an impenetrable mystery. ”

“ Detectives and policemen, taken as a whole, are by no means the bunglers and boobies that they are made out to be in the pantomimes and in the pages of detective stories. I do not say that they are all born geniuses in the detection of crime, for genius is no commoner among detectives than it is among bakers, bankers, clergymen, novelists, barristers, or cooks. ”

“ From the comparatively easy work of watching or "locating," he is advanced through the more difficult varieties of "shadowing" and "trailing," until eventually he may develop into a first-class man who will be set to unravel a murder mystery or to "rope" a professional criminal. But with years of training the best material makes few real detectives, and the real detective remains in fact the man who sits at the mahogany desk in the central office and presses the row of mother of pearl buttons in front of him. ”

“ Singular as it may seem, nearly every professional thief has a method of working up his "jobs," and a detective very frequently can positively say: "Such and such a person had a hand in that affair," merely because they know the style and method of the work. ”

“ However able or brilliant a detective is, he cannot systematically bring off successful coups single-handed—outside a novel. He is a wheel in a machine. Or perhaps, a better way to put it would be to say, he is a unit in an army. He is almost helpless alone.
"There are many people who believe that a detective's work is a kind of mental sleight of hand. ”

“ He is enjoyed not because he creates mystery, but because he destroys mystery. Nobody would have the courage to publish a detective-story which left the problem exactly where it found it. That would rouse even the London public to revolution. No one dare publish a detective-story that did not detect. ”

“ Stafford," he said; "but I do recognize the force of what you say. Scotland Yard is beneath contempt. I know of cases—but I will not detain you with them now. They bungle their work terribly at Scotland Yard. A detective should be a man of imagination, of initiative, of deep knowledge of human nature. In the presence of a mystery he should be ready to find motives, to construct them and put them into play, as though they were real—work till a clue was found. Then, if none is found, find another motive and work on that. The French do it. They are marvels. Hamard is a genius, as you say. ”

“ Smug and plump, you never would have suspected this shopboy or café waiter out for a holiday, to be a detective destined to European fame. A chilly-blooded calculator, a profound thinker, with an intimate knowledge of all the most terrible abysses of crime. A man merciless and fearless as a sword. ”

“ All I’m saying is that in life a detective’s job is a very different matter to—well, take the illustrious example—to that of Sherlock Holmes. He’s got to make the crime fit to the clues, not the clues fit into the crime. ”

“ The detective’s adventure was like to make the house notorious. For several minutes after I had left its neighborhood my imagination pictured room after room shut up from the light of day, but bearing within them the impalpable aura of those two shadows flitting through them like the ghosts of ghosts, as the detective had tellingly put it.
The heart has its strange surprises. Through my whole ride and the indulgence in these thoughts I was conscious of a great inner revulsion against all I had intimated and even honestly felt while talking with the inspector. ”

“ To be a thief is bad enough, but to call yourself a detective and then be in league with a gang of cut-throats, river-pirates and burglars, is far worse, and I give you my word that I intend to shove you as hard as I can. ”

“ Yes, because the detective is a romantic figure, a hero, gifted with almost superhuman keenness and infallibility. Nobody ever accused me of being romantic. I am only an ordinary fellow who plugs away like any other business man. Every day I am up against it; I fall down; some crook turns a trick on me. What kind of a story would that make? ”

“ So he left Block to show the Countess back to the waiting-room, and, motioning to the porter that he might also go, the Chief hastened to the sleeping-car, the examination of which, too long delayed, claimed his urgent attention.
It is the first duty of a good detective to visit the actual theatre of a crime and overhaul it inch by inch,—seeking, searching, investigating, looking for any, even the most insignificant, traces of the murderer’s hands. ”

“ In our American literature the most popular detective stories are not composed of the imaginary performances of fictitious characters. We have made a great advance on that unsatisfactory and effete style. To satisfy the exacting palate of our reading people, we require a real flesh-and-blood detective, with a popular name and reputation, to pose as the figurehead, while an ingenious scribbler does the romancing. ”

“ If there is a room in this house which ought to be looked into, it is mine. For the very reason that it is the last one a detective would examine, makes it possibly the very one a thief would choose for the purpose of concealment. ”

“ There seems to be a romantic impulse for some in the very trials that beset the path of crime. The more hair-breadth escapes to be made, the more eagerly do these villains seem to enter upon their course. But I must not stop to moralize farther here. Unwilling to recite any tale of my own experience of the kind to which I have alluded, as related to the rescuing of intended female victims from the snares of the despoiler, which now comes to my mind, I will recall, as clearly as I can, the story of a brother detective. ”

“ However obscure a mystery may be, there is always some point or circumstance which, if rightly interpreted, will lead to its solution. Even in those crimes which have never been elucidated this point exists, only it has never been duly appreciated. It is this key-clew, as I may call it, for which the detective first looks, and, since few crimes, if any, are committed without some definite reason, it is most frequently found in the motive. ”

“ No one has seen him enter or depart; his position is far above the reach of suspicion; every clue has been destroyed in the fire-place, and no witness to his guilt can possibly be raised up. So he thinks; and as month after month passes, as detective after detective abandons the case in despair, as the excitement dies out in the public mind, and as the friends of the deceased apparently give up the hopeless task of seeking for the murderer, his confidence becomes complete, and he no longer fears detection. ”

“ The best detective is he who has that infinite capacity for taking pains which has been defined as the true test of genius. It is not by guesses or sensational snapshots that crimes are unearthed, but by the slow process of routine, almost commonplace inquiry, after the most minute and painstaking investigation of the traces—often of the most minute character—left upon the theatre of the deed. ”

“ Something of the same interest is given to the "crowded city's horrible street" by the suggestions of crime and romance, of curiosity and its gratification, which we find written with more or less cleverness in the enormous mass of so-called detective literature under which the press groans. Every bookstall has its shilling shocker, and every magazine which aims at a circulation must have its mystery of robbery or murder. ”

“ This stirring detective story holds the attention of the reader from the very start. It is full of action, presenting a baffling situation, the solving of which carries one along in a whirlwind of excitement. Through the story runs a love plot that is interwoven with the mystery of a secret-service case. ”

“ He knew where the grounds of suspicion lay—in his possession of two rings, which were undoubtedly very similar to the rings which lay in the tray that he and the detective had found on the table in the back-parlour of the pawnshop. It needed no effort on the part of one who had already had considerable experience in the construction of plots for stories, to see how the police would build up a theory of their own. Here, they would say, is a young fellow, who on his own confession, is so hard up, so penniless, indeed, that he has had to pawn his watch. ”

“ The public generally have an idea that a detective can make something out of nothing that the merest film of a clew is all that is necessary with which to build up a strong substantial edifice of facts. It is only the Messieurs La Coqs and 'Old Sleuths' of books and illustrated weeklies that are possessed with the second sight, and can hunt down the shrewdest criminals, without being bound to such petty things as clews, circumstantial evidence or witnesses. ”

“ This is the real point, where the services of an experienced detective, are most valuable. The plan by which [Pg 45] a detective operation is to be conducted, is as important as the method of procedure. To find a man who is hiding from justice, his criminality being well known, is a task of little difficulty, compared with the labor involved in mysterious cases, where there is apparently, nothing left to identify the criminal. ”

“ Detectives are, for the most part, excellent citizens—very punctilious in observing the laws, themselves, as well as being social regulators to enforce others to respect them, also. Still, whatever the intrinsic moral life or character of the detective may be, his art is a devilish one, and civilization is responsible for it. ”