The self-torment she was talking about was the way that people love to be teased by a mystery. To trace the roots of detective fiction, she delved into ancient texts like a gumshoe determined to leave no stone unturned. Her hunt for early forerunners of the detective story yielded some unlikely suspects. Analysis of evidence featured in the Apocrypha, the fabrication of false clues appeared in Herodotus, and psychological detection underpinned the story of Rhampsinitus. Sayers was stretching to prove her point, but not as far as it might seem. Nine years after her anthology appeared, the murderer in John Dickson Carr’s To Wake the Dead relied on an intricate scheme echoing the story of Rhampsinitus.
Why had detective fiction not developed sooner? The Jews, ‘with their strongly moral preoccupation’ were, Sayers felt, well suited to create detective stories. So were the Romans, with their taste for logic and law-making. She identified elements of detection in one of the Grimms’ tales, and in an Indian folk-tale. Yet although stories about crime had flourished for centuries, the detective story could not thrive until the wider public sympathized more with the forces of law and order than the law-breakers.
Sayers argued that the ground rules for the genre were set forever in the United States, in the 1840s, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote five seminal tales of mystery and imagination. First came ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, a ‘locked room’ story. A woman and her daughter are found savagely murdered inside a locked room. The central puzzle, borrowed by hundreds of Poe’s successors was – how could the murderer have got in and out?
Poe created a gifted and eccentric amateur sleuth, Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, the first of fiction’s Great Detectives. Dupin’s cases were told by an unnamed chronicler, setting the template for Holmes and Watson, Poirot and Hastings, and dozens of less celebrated pairings, in which admiring sidekicks ranging from the obtuse to the sophisticated recount the exploits of amateur sleuths who almost always outsmart the professional police. The neat twist in ‘The Purloined Letter’ was that the solution was so obvious that everyone overlooked it. Chesterton’s ‘The Invisible Man’ was the most famous of many later stories using this trick of a clue hidden in plain sight. Even more influential was ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’, in which Dupin plays the ‘armchair detective’. This was the very first detective story based on a criminal puzzle from real life.
Marie Roget was the fictional counterpart of Mary Rogers. She worked in a New York tobacconist’s, and her ‘raven tresses’, womanly figure and tantalising smile inspired young male customers to poetry and earned her the sobriquet ‘the beautiful cigar girl’. Among Mary’s admirers was a young lawyer called Alfred Crommelin. She rejected his advances, and became engaged to Daniel Payne, a cork cutter. Subsequently, she left a note at Crommelin’s apartment, hinting at a reconciliation. When he did not reply, she sent him a series of letters, and asked for money. Shortly afterwards, on 23 July 1841, she disappeared. This was not the first time she had vanished without explanation; the same thing had happened three years earlier.
A few days after she went missing, a group of young men decided to escape the steamy heat of the city by walking out to Sybil’s Cave at Hoboken. They noticed clothes floating in the shallow waters of the North River, and thought someone had fallen in. Finding a wooden scull nearby, they rowed over to the bobbing objects, to discover the body of a young woman, whose long black hair rippled in the water like seaweed. A slip of cloth was knotted around her neck. One report said, ‘Her forehead and face appeared to have been battered and butchered, to a mummy.’
The remains were identified as Mary’s. A popular theory was that she had been killed by a gang, although Payne and Crommelin also came under the microscope. The plot thickened when some of her garments were found close to a tavern run by a Mrs Frederica Loss. Daniel Payne committed suicide, and Frederica Loss was shot by one of her sons, but the precise details of Mary Rogers’ death were never established. Mrs Loss supplemented her income with work as an abortionist, and Mary’s death probably followed a termination that went wrong.
Poe hinted at the truth in his story (transplanted to Dupin’s home turf in Paris) as well as offering a more imaginative alternative theory. Sayers was impressed by his efforts at solving a real-life mystery, and by Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘splendid efforts’ on behalf of George Edalji and Oscar Slater, wrongly accused men who benefited from his work as an amateur detective. Detection Club members were keen to follow the lead given by Poe and Conan Doyle – none more so than Sayers herself.
Poe showed how to transform a real-life case into detective fiction, and a generation later Wilkie Collins followed his example in The Moonstone. He borrowed details from the Constance Kent case, and based Inspector Cuff on the real-life Inspector Whicher. For Sayers, The Moonstone came closer to perfection than any other detective story, even though Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was incontestably the greatest detective. Collins was the most gifted author of Victorian ‘sensation novels’, but the short story remained the dominant form in detective fiction until the Golden Age.
Sayers loved the Holmes tales, and admired the way Conan Doyle enriched English literature with countless memorable lines. There is a striking resemblance between lines from ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ and a passage in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, while the success of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the television show Sherlock demonstrate that Holmes-speak still appeals in the twenty-first century.
Sherlock Holmes’ leading rivals were created by three contrasting writers – a socially mobile Cockney, a rural dean, and a Hungarian baroness – who would become Detection Club members. Arthur Morrison, son of an engine fitter, exploited his literary gifts to escape London’s slums. A journalist, he hit his stride with Tales of the Mean Streets¸ but could scarcely have guessed that ‘mean streets’ would become a phrase associated with American private eyes. Morrison depicted the East End with an insider’s expertise, but became embarrassed by his humble origins. He even falsified data on the national census to conceal his date and place of birth. It is a pity he was so sensitive, since the strength of his writing lies in an understanding of working class life that Berkeley, Sayers and Christie could never match.
Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, a lawyer turned private investigator, was meant to fill the gap left by Holmes’ plunge into the Reichenbach Falls. Portly and good-natured, Hewitt was too ordinary to outshine the sage of 221b Baker Street, dead or alive. More distinctive was Horace Dorrington, a suave villain who plans a murder at the start of The Dorrington Deed-Box. His scheme fails, and although he escapes justice, his intended victim discovers the records of several cases in which Dorrington combines work as a private inquiry agent with shameless criminality. Morrison abandoned Dorrington after one book, but had created the literary ancestor of the murderous charmer Tom Ripley, created by Patricia Highsmith, herself a member of the Detection Club, and of Jeff Lindsay’s serial killer Dexter Morgan.
Thorpe Hazell was another eccentric Great Detective. Hazell is a specialist railway detective, a vegetarian and health fanatic. After solving the puzzle of ‘Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture’, he declines Sir Gilbert’s offer of a cooked lunch. He has already ordered lentils and salad to eat at a railway station, and starts to perform his ‘physical training ante-luncheon exercises’. As the bewildered baronet watches him ‘whirling his arms like a windmill’, Hazell explains, ‘Digestion should be considered before
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