[In the following essay, Panek discusses a number of authors of crime-mystery-detective stories who wrote during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.]

When Doyle prematurely killed Holmes in 1894, The Strand Magazine announced in desperation that a new batch of Sherlock Holmes stories “will commence in an early number.” Knowing this was unlikely, the editors kept their collective foot in the door Doyle had opened by promising, “meanwhile, powerful detective stories will be contributed by other eminent writers.” There were, however, no authentically “eminent” detective writers around. The Strand's advertisement, as well as other magazines' willingness to print detective stories in the hopes of bagging a trophy like Doyle, made people into detective writers overnight. At the turn of the century, dozens of people became detective writers, and writers from Adams to Zangwill hoped to invent that better man-trap which would line up editors outside their doors. In spite of the fact that the turn of the century saw a robust crop of new detective stories, a number of things have prevented their serious assessment by historians of the genre. First of all, there are an awful lot of writers to read through. More important than this, the fiction of the period falls between Doyle on the one hand and the one-two punch of the Golden Age novel and the hard-boiled story on the other hand. Critical admiration for the predecessor and the successors has obscured what comes between them.

Also, much turn of-the-century detective fiction appeared in magazines, and even when it was collected in book form, it is difficult to find: the British Museum, for instance, lacks many American writers just as the Library of Congress does not hold the corresponding British writers of the period. Finally, turn-of-the-century stories seem much more dated and time-locked than detective stories written either earlier or later. This happens because of the derivative nature of some of the fiction, but the stories of the period often display an obsession with what contemporary readers can only view as quaintly antique technology. Nevertheless, the period did witness plenty of “powerful detective stories.” In fact, turn-of-the-century stories show more widespread and conscious experimentation with the detective character and the narrative technique of the detective story than any other fiction since Poe's.

Sherlock Holmes, of course, stands behind most turn-of-the-century fiction. With Doyle in the wings, writers simply could not think about the detective story without having Holmes lurking in one synapse or another. Different writers, however, treated Holmes in different ways. From the very beginning, a whole class of people noticed Doyle provided grist for the mills of satire, parody, and burlesque. Even before Holmes' Swiss excursion, Robert Barr (1850-1912) had written “Detective Stories Gone Wrong: The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs” (1892) and J. M. Barrie (1860-1937) had probably written “The Adventure of the Two Collaborators” (1893?). A crowd of people took to writing Holmes spoofs: A. A. Milne's first published work was “The Rape of the Sherlock” (1903), and some of the best known American writers and wits, including Twain, O. Henry, Harte, and Leacock, had a go at Doyle's creation. Much of the material in the parodies is, to be sure, superficial. Doyle's names, for instance, come in for a good bit of chaff with parody detectives named Shylock Homes, Picklock Holes, Shamrock Jolnes, Suburban Holmes, and Shirley Combs (the latter by one A. Conning Goil). In terms of substance, Watson takes a few raps, most notably in Bret Harte's description: “with the freedom of an old friend I at once threw myself in my familiar attitude at his feet, and gently caressed his boot …” Most of the satiric bastinado, however, gets applied to the detective. Almost universally, the satirists, parodists, and burlesquers thump on the intellectual pretentiousness of the great detective. Frequently, they show him throwing up a huge lump of logic which proves to be laughably wrong. John Kendrick Bangs' (1862-1922) satire, “A Pragmatic Enigma” (1908), for instance, ends with the newspaper headline:

DO DETECTIVES DETECT?
A Gazoozle Reporter, Disguised as a Harvard Professor,
Calls on Sherlock Holmes, Esq.,
And Gets Away with Two Suitcases
Full of the Great Detective's Personal Effects,
While Dr. Watson's Hero
Tells What He Does Not Know About
PRAGMATISM.

Holmes spoofs provided, indeed continue to provide, a bit of harmless recreation and sport. They do, however, point us to the motif of intellect which in various ways dominates serious turn-of-the-century detective stories. More importantly, the parodies created the playful spirit some significant writers managed to join with other more serious issues of the detective story. Although they are not thorough-going spoofs, Israel Zangwill's (1864-1926) The Big Bow Mystery (1892) and Mary Roberts Rinehart's (1876-1926) The Circular Staircase (1908) anticipate the mature fusion of the comic and serious sides of the detective story which flourished during the Golden Age.

In terms of subject matter, turn-of-the-century detective writers recognized they could use the detective story as an examination of character, or as an explanation of a process, or both. Because of the surprise requirements of the detective story and because of the demands of the short story form, detective writers' examination of character limited itself largely to the presentation of the detective's character. We will get back to this in a moment. The other area open for exploration was the narrative explanation of a process. Detection remained a new enough profession so that many writers and readers found satisfaction simply in following what the detective does: the process of looking at footprints, considering medical data, putting on disguises, solving ciphers, and so on. The process of police work remains for many readers one of the continuing attractions of the form even in contemporary detective stories. At the turn of the century, moreover, describing the mechanics of detection held the added advantage of feeding back in to the inflation of the hero's intellect. Yet during the period something new started. Even though plenty of writers dealt with the traditional crime at the country house, some writers like Arthur Morrison (1863-1945) began to appreciate that the detective story could also inform readers about other kinds of processes. In other words, writers began to present, as secondary material, quick looks behind the scenes at a bicycle race, a safety deposit, or a pawn shop, and this material supplemented the satisfactions of observing the detective's practices. Because of the short story form and the focus on the great detective, however, this impulse did not fully develop until much later.

Serious detective writers, rather than following through on original impulses, stuck close to Doyle. It is very difficult, in fact, to find a detective writer of the period who does not, in one way or another, bounce off Sherlock Holmes. In some cases, writers draw their plots rather clearly from Doyle. Catherine Louisa Pirkis' (?-1910) “The Redhill Sisterhood” reflects Doyle's “The Reigate Squires” (1893) not only geographically, but also in terms of the mechanics of the crime. As late as 1910, T. W. Hanshew (1857-1914) lifted “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891) for his “The Rainbow Pearl.” Along with these and other parallels, writers found certain ways of constructing detective stories which became almost obligatory simply because he had used them. Thus, even though writers of the period did use first and third person narration, the most important writers employed Watsons: Arthur Morrison, Ernest Bramah (1868-1942) and R. Austin Freeman (1862-1943) did, as did Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912), Arthur B. Reeve (1880-1936) and Baroness Orczy (1865-1947). Writers at the turn of the century very simply perceived that fortunes or reputations could be made out of Doyle's prodigality. Each of the talents Doyle showered upon Holmes was capable of much more development and, indeed, could be made the basis of a character, a plot, or a whole subgenre of detective stories. Because Holmes acted and used disguise with consummate skill, disguising became an inevitable feature of new detective stories and formed the basis for Hanshew's Man of Forty Faces (1910), even though it was a minor part of Holmes' character. Likewise, Holmes' occasional perusal of the agony ads in newspapers blossoms into Samuel Hopkins Adams' (1871-1958) creation of Average Jones (1911) as an advertising advisor. Sherlock's dilettantish science, in turn, inspired the development of the scientific detective story. His occasional criminal excursions begat the gentleman burglar tale, and his brushes with Professor Moriarty and Colonel Moran helped to stimulate the adventures of certain master criminals.

As far as character goes, Doyle suggested two patterns which go a long way toward dominating turn-of-the-century detective fiction. First, Doyle, following the example of Poe, insisted the detective was not quite an ordinary mortal. He demonstrated this separateness by creating for Holmes certain personal eccentricities—the cocaine, the violin, the revolver practice, etc. Turn-of-the-century writers shared Doyle's impulse to differentiate the detective from ordinary people, but they also wanted to find an extraordinary character who was not Holmes and whose eccentricities arose from different sources. This led to the creation of women detectives, boy detectives, old detectives, blind detectives, clerical detectives, jolly detectives, grouchy detectives, and a selection of other eccentric types. In many ways, however, this was simply disguising, for turn-of-the-century detectives mostly do the same sort of things in spite of their habiliments—they think. Even though the Holmes tales hardly provide elaborate examinations of the intellectual process, the detective does protest that they should, and Doyle does go to some pains to give his stories an intellectual tint, if not an intellectual coloring. He conveys Holmes' genius in several specific ways: through surprise solutions, the enigmatic statement, the use of the awestruck sidekick, the observation test, and the deduction demonstrations which open many of the stories. Most writers of the period imitate these things. Surprises are, of course, universal. Detectives following Sherlock Holmes are as close-mouthed and enigmatic as the master. We have already seen the use of the obtuse narrator. Arthur Morrison's detective, Martin Hewitt (1894), gives his companion the same sort of observation examinations with which Holmes harries Watson. Detectives as diverse as Robert Barr's Eugene Valmont (1906) and Adams' Average Jones provide intellectual test drives for their clients in the form of Holmesian thought-reading or deduction demonstrations.

While all of this material was simply furniture to Doyle, turn-of-the-century writers began to take a more serious look at the intellectual processes implicit in the detective's role in the detective story. They began to ask why and how this person can observe or think better than other individuals. One answer to these questions was that he cannot. We can see an attack on the genius, based on the notion that it takes little in the way of exceptional intelligence to solve crimes and certainly nothing along the unbelievable lines drawn in the character of the genius detective. Detectives like the narrator of Max Pemberton's Jewel Mysteries I Have Known (1894) and Matthias M. Bodkin's Paul Beck (1898) hold with the latter's statement “I just go by the rule of thumb, and muddle and puzzle out my cases as best I can.” Dick Donovan clearly points the finger when he says

… if I had been the impossible detective of fiction, endowed with the absurd attributes of being able to tell the story of a man's life from the way the tip of his nose was formed, or the number of hairs on his head … or one hundred and one utterly ridiculous and burlesque signs which are so easily read by the detective prig of modern creation, I might have come to a different conclusion.

Yet, in spite of these anti-sentiments, indeed coexisting with them, the majority of turn-of-the-century fiction rests on the person of the genius detective who can think better than anyone else. We do find, however, more impulse to anatomize the mental processes which lead to assembling facts into a conclusion or following the obscure clue to the hidden criminal. Common sense in itself is an explanation, albeit a flimsy one, of mental process. Some writers of the period follow through the tradition of mechanical logic founded by Gaboriau and briefly fostered by Doyle. Gaston Leroux's popular The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) contains long passages on the use of reason, and Jacques Futrelle implies the same thing by naming his detective “The Thinking Machine” (1907). Although writers can make mechanically logical detectives into interesting characters, these characters were somewhat old-fashioned. To take a closer, more informative look at the human intellect, turn-of-the-century writers evolved some subgenres of the detective story which retained the traditional attractions of the form while highlighting neglected areas of intellectual operations. We can see, therefore, in the scientific story, in Chesterton's fairy tales, and in the exploration of eccentric detectives, the evolution of a spectrum of new alternatives to the story resting solely on the rendering of logic.

The scientific detective story became, especially after the turn of the century, one of the more important manifestations of the form. It appeared in several different permutations, but chiefly scientific stories boil down to portraying the detective as a scientist or building the principal crime around some sort of scientifically technical means. These stories grew out of detective fiction's continuing definition and redefinition of the nature of human intelligence, adulation for the new manifestation of genius in the person of the inventor, and writers' and readers' fascination with the brave new world delivered by radio waves, electricity, and the practical applications of science in the new technology. In a way, the scientific tale reacted against the pseudo-scientific tidbits Doyle tossed off in the course of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and it was a new form of the detective-machine analogy Gaboriau popularized. On the other hand, it reacted optimistically and in a socially conservative manner to the same culture which induced H. G. Wells to invent modern science fiction in The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). The first notable scientific detective stories appeared in L. T. Meade's Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1894-1896) which ran, like the Holmes stories, in The Strand. These pieces, however, are shoddy work when compared to R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke series (1907). In spite of Freeman, though, the scientific detective story found a more enthusiastic reception in America than it did in Britain. During the first two decades of the century, American writers adopted the scientific story as their own. We can even witness the fusion of the scientific detective story with science fiction in Hugo Gernsback's (1884-1967), the gadget king of early science fiction, foundation of the Scientific Detective Monthly in 1930. Gernsback, however, lagged behind the times. The scientific story had its heyday in the early teens. After the First World War, it withered away, in part because of the widespread opposition to it by Golden Age writers, and in part because the war itself showed just what modern technology could do.

The turn of the century witnessed real advances in scientific criminology and toxicology. Chemical tests, like the 1898 introduction of the Precipitin test which distinguishes human from animal blood stains, were invented. Fingerprinting was belatedly accepted in Britain in the Stratton case of 1905. Alfred Swaine Taylor's The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence (1865) and Hans Gross' Criminal Investigation (trans. 1907) gave academic grounding and a certain popularity to scientific criminology. Finally, several sensational trials, like that of Crippen in 1910, made the public aware of the uses of science in criminal investigations. All of these things prepared the material and the public for the subject matter the scientific detective writers used. The scientific story not only publicized the new discoveries of scientific criminology, and explained them as fascinating processes, it also served to reassure or warn people about the objectivity and infallibility of justice. Stories which concentrate solely on publicizing a real or imaginary process or gadget, however, in large measure doom themselves. Therefore, when Arthur B. Reeve tells us that Craig Kennedy (1912) or Constance Dunlap uses a telegraphone, a detectoscope, or a telautograph, it can only strike us as quaint. The Achievements of Luther Trant (1910) by Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg yields an even odder list of technological marvels in the pneumograph, the chromoscope, the kymograph, and the plethysmograph. These American writers centered their stories on scientific gadgets; Reeve especially tried to build up suspense by holding off his explanations of exactly what his black boxes do. All of this severely hobbles the fiction by dating it so quickly. Few can get excited over Reeve's introduction of a blood pressure cuff or Freeman's ecstasy over the invention of a miniature vacuum cleaner.

More fictionally propitious, the scientific story added new variety to the surprise element in the detective story by providing villains with an almost limitless pharmacopoeia, zoo, and physics laboratory from which to select their murder weapons. With science, almost anything becomes possible, and writers often concluded their stories not with a god but with a machine from the machine. Thus, T. W. Hanshew has Cleek contest with villains using x-rays, ultraviolet rays, and electricity on their victims. Bramah's Max Carrados finds electricity behind “The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage” (1914), and Samuel Hopkins Adams' Average Jones discovers a murderer using a trombone's music to break a glass vial of acid suspended above explosives, as well as malefactors employing poisonous spiders and poison gas. This kind of solution, of course, provides a new sort of surprise for readers who do not question scientific pronouncements, gives the writer details he can make consistent throughout the story and sum up briefly at the close, and adds a dimension to the detective's character.

Implied by the scientific criminal who exploits the frontiers of technology is the creation of the specialist in scientific detection. This, however, does not always happen. For a detective writer aiming for popular success, the idea of building the detective hero around the potentially humdrum scientific researcher seems to be too much trouble. Thus, just as Holmes knows just about everything, so does Hanshew's Hamilton Cleek. Cleek knows about things from Apache to ultraviolet because, well, because he does, and because his creator wants to keep his options open. Less fanciful writers, however, bring the detectives character more into line with the place of technology in their stories. Thus L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace show the transformation of Eric Vandeleur in The Sorceress of the Strand (1903): “He was no longer Eric Vandeleur, the man with the latest club story and the merry twinkle in his blue eyes: he was Vandeleur the medical jurist, with a face like a mask, his lower jaw slightly protruding and features very fixed.” This sort of Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jeckyll metamorphosis is reasonably rare. More often, we find the gadget stories show the magnification of the powers of the detective. Electronic bugs, for instance, fascinated Reeve, and he frequently used them to enable his detective to be in two places at once. The gadget story also rubs off public admiration for the inventor on the character of the detective. As a mark of genius, writers invoke the name or the accomplishments of Edison rather than trying to repeat the brooding romantic genius of Poe or even Doyle. The most influential scientific detective stories, however, rest pretty solidly on thinking, and, as such, they embody a variation of the traditional theme of the detective story. In a sense, any thinking about the material universe involves, in part or whole, scientific method, and the scientific story at its best highlights and expounds upon the nature and the uses of scientific thinking. Further, writers did this consciously and methodically. Adams, for instance, gives us this dialogue in Average Jones:

“Are you conversant with the Baconian system of thought, which Old Chips used to preach to us … ?” countered Average Jones.

“Forgotten it if I ever knew it,” returned Kirby.

“So I infer from your repeated use of the word ‘thief.’ Bacon's principle—an admirable principle in detective work—is that we should learn things from things and not from the names of things.”

This is an advance on “you know my methods, Watson.” It identifies the tradition and particulars of scientific thinking. The same thing happens when Average Jones tells us Euclid was “one of the greatest detectives of all time.” As concise and brilliant as Adams can be, however, he was not consistently a scientific writer; he is, further, little known to casual readers. The best known proponent of the scientific story was R. Austin Freeman.

Richard Austin Freeman usually gets most of the praise or blame which critics apportion to the scientific story. His detective hero, Dr. Thorndyke, has been described as “the greatest medico-legal detective of all time,” and he has also been viewed as a tiresome flayer of insignificant facts. These views differ because of the differences in conceptions about the nature of the detective story and because Freeman chose, in Dr. Thorndyke's cases, to write one kind of detective story rather than another. Although Freeman's first experience with detective fiction was with his gentleman crook stories in The Adventures of Romney Pringle (1902), he did not find his metier until he created his scientific detective. Dr. Thorndyke appeared first in The Red Thumb Mark (1907) and continued in collections of short stories and novels until 1942. To begin with, Thorndyke depends in a number of ways upon Sherlock Holmes. Freeman narrates the stories through a Watson, Christopher Jervis, he makes Thorndyke a consulting detective just as Holmes is, and some of the early stories look backward to Doyle's material. Freeman's “31 New Inn” (1911?), for instance, began in Doyle's “The Engineer's Thumb” (1892) and “The Greek Interpreter” (1893). “The Mandarin's Pearl” (1909) and “The Echo of a Mutiny” (1912) look backward to the returned revenger in Doyle. The character of Dr. Thorndyke, too, has a certain love-hate relationship with Sherlock Holmes. On one hand, Freeman developed him as a reaction against Holmes' eccentricities and flamboyance, intending his detective to be a neutral medium through which scientific reasoning would show. Yet Freeman, like Doyle, modeled his hero on one of his own medical school heroes, Alfred Swaine Taylor, author of the famous Medical Jurisprudence. More importantly, try as he will to limit Thorndyke, Freeman ends up giving him some of the universal knowledge possessed by Holmes. Thus, Dr. Thorndyke knows not only about things like Ptosis and ptyalism, but also about cuneiform and Moabite script. Perhaps the most Holmesian trait developed in Dr. Thorndyke is the detective's role as a teacher, for Thorndyke not only discovers truth, he finds it in such a way as to demonstrate the principles of his intellectual method.

The Dr. Thorndyke stories are scientific stories in the fullest sense: the detective is a scientist, he uses scientific gadgets, techniques, and knowledge, and the stories often turn on scientific facts. Freeman combines all of the elements of the scientific detective story. Yet, in a real sense, the Thorndyke tales simply extend the motifs of observation, logic, and mathematics which developed from Poe to Gaboriau to early Doyle. In most of the stories, Thorndyke succeeds simply because he looks more carefully and fully than others do. The main difference in Freeman lies in the detective's use of scientific aids to augment the inherent weakness of the human senses. Thus the camera and the microscope let the detective observe things which the unaided eyes of the police miss. That is one point about science in Freeman. Another is, unlike Doyle, Freeman insisted on supplying accurate, verifiable information in the stories: when Freeman notes chemical properties or describes the criminal's means, he makes sure they are true or possible, abandoning the unknown poisons and brain fever which earlier writers had used to plot their way out of trouble. He approached his fiction, in other words, with the scientific thesis that experiments must be capable of duplication. Additionally, Freeman did realize machines produce facts, not truth. His stories, although they use gadgets, do not center on them. Indeed, Freeman directed his readers' fascination with technology toward Polton, Thorndyke's lab assistant. Wonder in the face of technology takes second place to the genius of the detective. As Freeman demonstrates by using the obtuse narrator, possession of the facts, as important as it is, cannot alone lead to the truth. To find truth, one must apply, rigorously and elegantly, scientific method. In the stories, Dr. Thorndyke presents a more insistent and realistic picture of the working of scientific logic than Sherlock Holmes does. Thorndyke actually does use deduction, approaching each case with a range of theories and then carefully examining the facts to determine which is correct. Freeman not only prosecutes his campaign for scientific method by giving Thorndyke little speeches about it, he also bases the narrative form of some of his stories on the idea that admiration for methodology could be as attractive as the traditional surprise ending of the detective story. In response to Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men (1905) and the guessing contest he ran with its publication, Freeman wrote a series of “inverted” stories collected in The Singing Bone (1912). These inverted stories first describe the commission of the crime and then follow the detective's discovery of the truth. Here Freeman thought he provided readers an opportunity to appreciate scientific method without the customary distractions of the detective story. He was, however, wrong. His inverted stories spring from and succeed because of Freeman's combination of elements of the gentleman crook story, like his own Romney Pringle yarns, and the detective story's traditional adulation of genius. This, in fact, extends to all of Freeman's stories: when they succeed, they do not work because of the science in them but because of the fiction in them.

The scientific detective story was not, however, the only type of turn-of-the-century story or the only type of approach to the intellectual issues implicit in detective story material. Beginning with The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), G. K. Chesterton had a powerful impact on the detective story's portrait of human problem solving. In the Father Brown stories, which he continued to write until 1935, Chesterton also demonstrated new stylistic and thematic possibilities for the detective story. Chesterton based his priest detective on Monsignor John O'Connor whom he met in 1904 and who impressed upon him the wide range of knowledge of crime and sin priests gain in the confessional. From O'Connor, Chesterton gave his Father Brown an extensive knowledge of criminals' trade secrets as well as the understanding of the passage of sin through the guts of human life and individuals' souls. Although he plotted the Father Brown tales as detective stories, with the detective's enigmatic statements forecasting the surprise at the end, Chesterton's fictions are essentially exemplae demonstrating the nature of Roman Catholic doctrine. Several of the Father Brown stories look forward to Sayers in their contrast of mechanical, materialistic rationality as opposed to the true reason of the church, and most of them, additionally, preach the need for the power of confession. The stories, moreover, bring a new sort of writing to the genre. Simply because of their ties to logic and rationality, earlier detective fiction employs either neutral diction or the semi-comic diction common to much popular writing at the turn-of-the-century. Chesterton, however, writes the Father Brown stories in a poetic style which aids in removing them from the mundane world and helps to place them much closer to the magical world of the fairy tale.

Critics generally have a hard time with the Father Brown stories: with the detective side damning Chesterton for including too little reason in the stories and the literary side complaining he uses too much detection and reason. This, of course, cannot be. Even though the Father Brown stories do argue for Catholicism, as fiction they are detective stories and as such respond to contemporary detective literature. The most pointed example of this rests with Chesterton's introduction of Flambeau, the antagonist in three of the first four stories. Flambeau is a gentleman crook right out of the current vogue for such characters. His sense of artistry, dexterity of disguise, sense of irony, as well as Father Brown's demonstration of the moral paucity of his life in “The Flying Stars” (1911), all provide an apotheosis of this popular trend in detective fiction.

As important as this is, Father Brown develops as one of the many reactions to the character of Sherlock Holmes. Chesterton deliberately makes him quiet, unassuming, physically small, and seemingly “dull as a Norfolk dumpling.” Although the didactic nature of the stories causes Chesterton to have him occasionally thunder in the vein of a Jonathan Edwards, the fairy tale atmosphere also gives his enigmatic statements the quality of a Buddhist master's wise imponderables in an oriental story.

Father Brown also possesses an amount of preternatural awareness, and this has moved detective classicists to go tsk-tsk. Chesterton, however, like his friend E. C. Bentley, freely admits that, as a detective, Father Brown both intuits and guesses. But Father Brown does not detect by brain waves or automatic writing. Chesterton bases all of the stories upon observable material or psychological facts. What Chesterton does is to depict a part of human intelligence earlier detective writers ignored. With inductive reason, no matter how many specifics the investigator collects, they will not by themselves produce a conclusion. Bacon was absolutely wrong when he thought a properly constructed experiment could by itself lead to truth. A thinking machine cannot think, but merely tabulates. A gap always exists between data and conclusion, a space of varying size over which the investigator must make the inductive leap. Chesterton shows, buoyed by the faith and higher reason of the church, Father Brown can make the inductive leap with ease. He can do this because long ago he made the more important leap of faith which guides his guesses and intuitions and enables him to solve human problems. Even if Chesterton went beyond the normal limits of the detective story with the Father Brown tales, he demonstrated new possibilities for the form and brought a new area of consciousness into the detective story's exploration of human intelligence.

Part of Chesterton's motive for creating Father Brown as an insignificant person and as a priest came from a general turn-of-the-century search for different kinds of detectives. In their exploration of the varieties of mental experience, as well as in their impulse to find unusual detective characters to contrast to Sherlock Holmes, late Victorian writers fastened on to the character of the lady detective. Although stories about women detectives date back to the 1860s, with Anonyma's The Experiences of a Lady Detective (1861?) and Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective (1864), the Sherlock Holmes boom of the 1890's set writers to creating female detectives with a vengeance. One year, 1894, saw Catherine Pirkis' The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, M. E. Braddon's Thou Art the Man, featuring Coralie Urquhart, Charleton Savage's The Beech Court Mystery with “The Squirrel”, and Mrs. George Corbett's When the Sea Gives up its Dead, a Thrilling Detective Story, with Annie Cory.

For the next twenty years, the female detective became a common variant for writers looking for something a bit out of the usual character pattern of the post-Doyle detective. Many important writers of the period added stories about female detectives to supplement their works about male detectives: Fergus Hume created Hagar (1899) in his fruitless attempt to follow up the success of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace matched their scientific searchers with Florence Cusak (1899), Matthias M. Bodkin drew Dora Myrl (1900) to match and eventually marry his Paul Beck, and Grant Allen created Miss Cayley (1899) and Hilda Wade (1900) after his success with An African Millionaire (1897). Writers like Anna Katharine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart made much of their reputations from women detectives.

From the publishing point of view, the turn-of-the-century vogue for women detectives reflected an attempt to recapture the female reading public. As opposed to the characters and atmosphere of stories about male detectives, stories about women detectives slanted toward perceived women's interests. The setting and the details of stories like Rinehart's The Circular Staircase portray the trivia of household affairs and make incidental points like the heroine's valuation of her Spode over her Limoges china. As significant as this, we find the lady typist emerging as a popular character type. E. Phillips Oppenheim peoples his novels with lady typists, and we can note Tom Gallon's The Girl Behind the Keys (1903) involves a typist detective. All this reflects writers' attempts to appeal to a new class of readers upon whom the naked vigor of masculine intellect was supposedly wasted.

This approach was, however, a minority one. Women detectives became popular because, paradoxically, they were unusual. Here, women sleuths simply fit into the general search for unconventional or eccentric characters to turn into detectives. Beating the bushes for oddities flushed out grouchy detectives, criminal detectives, blind detectives, as well as a couple of child detectives. The female detective simply became the most commonly used variety of two-headed dog. We can see this in the almost omnipresent tag of “Lady” or “Female”, in the book titles: Clarice Dyke, the Female Detective (1899); Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective; Adventures of a Lady Detective (1890); Dora Myrl: the Lady Detective (1900); Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910); and Constance Dunlap, Woman Detective (1916). In addition to signaling the oddity of the contents, the introduction of the term “Lady” served to mute objections of women acting in an “unladylike” role.

Until 1905, women worked at Scotland Yard only in the capacity of chars or female searchers. Writers of fiction, however, realized the value of women police agents from early on. Following up on the ubiquitous disguise motif in turn-of-the-century fiction, creators of Lady detectives discovered that simply being a woman was an almost perfect disguise: the watcher or the spy needs to be inconspicuous and few types of person were as inconspicuous as a woman in the male-dominated world of crime and detection. Loveday Brooke's agency sends her out whenever her bosses receive a request for an agent who will blend into the wallpaper. The same thing happens with George R. Sims' Dorcas Dene, and Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange (1915) is such a precious size-nine socialite no one would dream of her being a detective.

Women detectives, too, embody a theme which became increasingly difficult to present in more hard-headed, male-oriented stories. In these stories, the theme of police discretion had almost disappeared as a subject of serious concern. Women detectives, however, frequently come into contact with fears about gossip. Conventionally seen as the guardians of social propriety, women detectives receive far more breathless confidences than do their male counterparts. As late as 1915, Green pointedly reassures her readers that Violet Strange does not air people's dirty linen. Finally, from the practical, crime-solving standpoint, the female detective story demonstrates that women observe certain classes of things more closely and scrupulously than men do. In “The Redhill Sisterhood,” Loveday Brooke bases her conclusions in part on the way women care for children. Orczy's Lady Molly closes one of her cases because she knows about hats and female attitudes toward them. All of these practical points about women as detectives, however, add only incidental detail to the detective story.

Although the female detective confronts the same sort of crime problems as her male counterparts, and in spite of the fact that women do solve ciphers and reason as well as men, most women detectives were dipped rather deeply in sentiment. With the exception of Bodkin's Dora Myrl, who is a sort of British Annie Oakley, and Hugh C. Weir's Madelyn Mack (1914), who has as much get up and go as any Yankee businessman, most women detectives have distinct sentimental ballast. L. T. Meade's Miss Cusak takes on “duties at once herculean and ghastly” for romantic reasons, and some writers created slandered or imprisoned lovers whom the woman detective works to free. Grant Allen's Miss Cayley and Hilda Wade, as well as Orczy's Lady Molly, have romantic axes to grind in their adventures. Dorcas Dene, descending into the pathetic, detects to support her blind husband. This, of course, formed part of the pitch to women readers, but in practical terms it meant most women detectives were one book phenomena: success at solving crimes led to marriage, and marriage took Victorian and Edwardian women out of the detective business.

Basic to the female detective story, and joining it to the main current in turn-of-the-century detective fiction, is the thesis that women do not think the same way men do. Just as the scientific story exhibits the operation of the scientific method, so the female story demonstrates the “typical” female intellect. Sometimes we find the slander, perpetrated in the Hagar stories and by Green's Mrs. Butterworth (1897), that women are constitutionally nosey. Widespread, and even less substantiated, is writers' exploitation of female intuition. Here, whether in the heart or in the head, writers found a new part of mental experience as well as a good excuse for not plotting. As in the scientific story, women's stories have rhetorical capsules inserted to defend or extol women's intuition. Lady Molly's assistant, for instance, says:

We of the Female Department are dreadfully snubbed by the men, though don't tell me that women have not ten times as much intuition as the blundering and sterner sex; my firm belief is that we shouldn't have half so many undetected crimes if some of the so-called mysteries were put to the test of feminine investigation.

Although stories about lady detectives mince their way toward a full recognition of women rather than taking steps or making strides, the female detective story does contain a bit of liberation for the detective genre. In the main, women detectives do not roughhouse with the bad guys, and they usually have a man on hand to make the arrest at the conclusion of the action. Nevertheless, women sleuths do sometimes spotlight the liberating effects of action and the excitement of being a detective. Rachael Innes, in The Circular Staircase, sums up her detective experience by telling us not about logic, but about the thrill of it all: “To be perfectly frank, I never lived until that summer.”

This sense of exhilaration with action, often subdued in the regular detective figures of the period, comes out in other eccentric types of detective. Harvey O'Higgins expands on Miss Innes' statement at the end of “The Blackmailers” (1915), a story about Barney the boy detective. At the end of the story, Barney dances a little jig which expresses “liberation from drudgery and dull commonplace. It welcomed rhythmically a life of adventure, in which a boy's natural propensity to lie should not only be unchecked but encouraged—that should give him, daily, games to play, hidings to seek, simple elders to hoodwink and masquerades to wear.” This statement not only represents one of the most perceptive analyses of the nature of detective fiction, but also illustrates the way in which turn-of-the-century writers used the unconventional detective character to broaden the possibilities of the form. Although the lady detective is the most common sort of eccentric sleuth, writers went far afield to find characters who would appeal to readers with their novelty, serve as means of examining the nooks and crannies of mental process, and help to vary the narrative possibilities of the detective story. In one sense, most turn-of-the-century characters exhibit one sort of peculiarity or another: the scientist, the priest, and the reformed crook were not common to the detective story before 1900. Of course, the scientist, the priest, the crook, the boy, and all of the others exist in potential in traditional detectives like Sherlock Holmes; turn-of-the-century writers, however, seized on the latent possibilities and thereby expanded the nature and the form of the detective story.

In terms of character, one class of writers set about creating eccentric detectives who could exhibit qualities of perception absent in the normal detective hero. From Poe onward, one of the detective's chief gifts lay in his ability to observe closely, and plenty of writers built their stories around what the detective sees as opposed to what normal people take in. At the turn-of-the-century, Richard Marsh composed a variation on this theme of observation by creating Judith Lee, a detective who reads lips, thereby exhibiting a skill which is both unusual and based solely on practice rather than on mystic muscle. Ernest Bramah did the same sort of thing, only more so. His stories about Max Carrados (1914) examine, in a witty and occasionally self-consciously outrageous way, the sensory compensation achieved by his blind detective. In both of these cases, writers use unexpected traits to say something about perception.

Rather than developing eccentric characters to explore unnoticed corners of perception, the most important manifestation of the eccentric detective appeared in its expansion of detective story as story. On the simplest level, Victor L. Whitechurch uses personal eccentricity only as decoration for his otherwise standard detective. Thorpe Hazell, the hero of Whitechurch's Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912), operates as a normal detective would, but as a fillip, the author depicts him as “a strong faddist on food and physical culture … [who] carries vegetarianism to an extreme, and was continually practicing various exercises of the strangest description.” Here the writer simply adds eccentricity to the usual detective, but in more important writers it has a noticeable impact on their fiction. Baroness Orczy's stories about the Old Man in the Corner (1901) show one example of this. Here a grubby, grey-beard loon transfixes a woman reporter with accounts of the true facts behind sensational crimes. Not only the Old Man's scrofulous anonymity and Queeg-like manipulation of a symbolic knotted string make him eccentric, his amorality jolts the stories from the usual moral-legal frame and toward the sort of picaresque aesthetic of the gentleman crook story. Going in a different direction, Melville Davisson Post's stories about Uncle Abner (1911) also use eccentricity to change the scope of the detective story. Even though Abner is a sort of Calvinistic Father Brown, Post's character pivots more surely on observation and secular logic than Chesterton's. The eccentricity of Post's stories comes only in part from the character; in large measure the eccentricity comes from Post's setting the stories in Pre-Civil War Virginia. This unusual setting not only colors the characters, it also brings in themes common to the historical novel, and to the frontier story for that matter, thereby making the Uncle Abner tales into something different.

Plunging into the even more eccentric, the gentleman crook story responded to some of the same impulses which brought writers to the eccentric detective. On the surface, there appears to be a contradiction: detective stories concern, well, detectives, so how does the gentleman crook fit in? Then, too, the crook story goes back to traditions slightly different from those which led to the detective story—to the Robin Hood legends, to picaresque tales, and to the Newgate story. Nevertheless, during the 1890's and early 1900's, the story about the gentleman crook fused with and responded to contemporary detective stories. Literally, some crook stories respond directly to Sherlock Holmes. Guy Boothby mentions Holmes in the beginning of “The Countess of Wiltshire's Diamonds” and Maurice Leblanc develops a character named Herlock Sholmes as an antagonist for his crook, Arsene Lupin.

On another level, the crook story touches on the detective's acknowledgment, from Dupin onward, that he is in potential a great criminal. The gentleman crook can be seen as a playful articulation of the double. Another way the crook stories respond to the detective story is that most writers make their crooks do detective work in one way or another. Dorrington, in Arthur Morrison's The Dorrington Deed Box (1897), acts as a detective even though he is clearly a scallawag or worse. Raffles, Arsene Lupin, Godahl, and Jimmie Dale, gentleman crooks to a man, all occasionally do detective work either to further their own crimes or to promote justice unavailable under the law. Some crook writers, in fact, use the techniques of detective story narration, mainly the surprise at the end of the story precipitated by authorial trickery, to make their stories run. Leblanc frequently structures the Arsene Lupin stories as detective pieces and Frank L. Packard frames The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917) with a detective problem.

Finally, the crook story responds to the same desire for the description of process we find in the detective stories of the same period. Just as readers wanted details of detective routine, they wanted details of criminal routine. Crook stories tell us how the burglar drills out a lock and we get a glimpse of the thief's exquisitely crafted kit of burglary tools. In both the detective story and the crook story, the effect of the information is the same: it does provide information as information but more importantly it enhances the skill, cleverness, and, ultimately, the genius of the hero. From another angle, we need to see the crook story as a response to the perceived stolidness and cliched nature of the regular detective story. Gentleman crooks have style, elan, and sprightliness missing in thinking machines or human bloodhounds. They dress immaculately, belong to the best clubs and move in the most sophisticated circles, but at the same time they can thumb their noses at all of the fakes, the ostentatious boors, and the oppressive know-it-alls. Crooks like R. Austin Freeman's Romney Pringle in The Adventures of Romney Pringle (1902) pull off what can only be considered jokes on people who richly deserve them, and this is something which Holmes could never do even if he tried to in stories like “Silver Blaze.”

On the other side of the same issue, crook stories sometimes plunge into serious issues of social and personal morality implicit in, but ignored by, detective stories. Post's stories about his crooked lawyer, beginning with The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason (1896), look at legal issues ignored in standard detective fiction, Chesterton's descriptions of Flambeau and E. W. Hornung's depiction of the relationship between Raffles and Bunny (1899) expose moral issues absent in straight detective stories.

Looking at turn-of-the-century crook stories, there are several ways to divide them up. One is by character. Out of the host of criminal trades (murderer rapist, fire bug, blackmailer, pornographer, purse snatcher, white slaver, and so on), crook stories focus on confidence men and burglars. Although neither type possesses much respectability, the bunco artist connects to the traditions of the picaro, and safe-cracking is a skilled trade. For our purposes, the con men begin with Grant Allen's Colonel Clay in An African Millionaire (1897), and include smooth-tongued fakes like G. R. Chester's Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford in a book of the same title (1908), Boothby's Simon Carne from A Prince of Swindlers (1897), and Freeman's Romney Pringle. Burglars received most of their impetus from Raffles, and continued in Leblanc's Arsene Lupin, Frederick Irving Anderson's Godahl, and Packard's Jimmie Dale. In a sense, dividing by character does little good because most of the gentlemen burglars are confidence men as well.

The crook story, however, does generate a distinct set of plots. First comes the disguise story: all of the heroes lead double lives so disguise plays a fundamental role in their profession. Then comes the narrative concentrating on process, whether it is the procedure of selling the Brooklyn Bridge or the technique of expert burglary. After this is the escape story which dwells on the crook's ability to wriggle out of tight spots occasioned by his own foolishness, circumstance, or the police. The crook versus crook plot appears fairly often with the hero cheating or being cheated by one of his brethren. Finally, there is the sentimental story which uses, but subordinates, the character of the crook and the mechanics of larceny to love or some other estimable cause. All of these plots, additionally, can be colored by the telling, and writers could choose to narrate into their stories vicarious excitement, social satire, burlesque, moral censure, or a combination of these to reach different parts of the readers' appreciations.

Maurice Leblanc's Arsene Lupin is probably the most engaging gentleman crook of the period, and his exploits exemplify the lighter side of the crook story and its relationship to the detective story. A. J. Raffles, however, influenced more subsequent writers, and through this character Hornung exhibits some of the darker side of the tradition.

Raffles is as important for the crook story as his brother-in-law's Sherlock Holmes tales are for the detective story. Like the Holmes tales, moreover, Hornung's stories about Raffles were altered by theatrical and cinematic versions which have transmitted an inaccurate picture of the tone and purpose of the originals. In the original stories, Raffles is an amateur cricketeer who turns to thievery to get himself out of a hole, and then continues to sustain his life of ease. He continues to burgle and swindle because he discovers that “cricket … like everything else is good enough sport until you discover a better. As a source of excitement it isn't in it with other things …” When he is not gingering up his adrenaline level, Raffles lives in luxury at the Albany or goes out on the town with his adoring friend “Bunny” Manders. Hornung put very little of Robin Hood into the stories. Raffles may say “I could no more scoop a till when the shopkeeper wasn't looking than I could bag apples out of an old woman's basket,” but this refusal to rob the poor results from snobbery rather than from any sort of moral, ethical, or social sense. Indeed, Raffles has none of these. He commits crimes out of a need for thrills, out of perverse puckishness, and in response to a twisted sense of art and artistry. Instead of more defensible motives, Raffles acts out of “the spirit of pure mischief in which he is prepared to risk his life and liberty.” In “An Old Flame,” for instance, Raffles does a bit of impromptu housebreaking, and while shinnying up the house front, he stops to bow to Bunny who watches amazed and aghast from the street. Through all of the stories, there also runs a sustained theme of decadence. When Bunny first sees Raffles' rooms, he is surprised to see the surroundings of an aesthete rather than the hearty suggested by A. J.'s cricketeering. Raffles does not simply long for excitement, he has a palate for depraved and outre human sensations. He says at one point, “I've told you before that the biggest man alive is the man who's committed a murder, and not yet been found out; at least he ought to be, but he seldom has the soul to appreciate himself.” For Raffles this attitude simply reflects his espousal of “art for art's sake.”

The Raffles stories have a double impact on readers. First, they appeal to the enjoyment of light-hearted nonchalance and disguised schoolboy pranks. Raffles is a carefree, insouciant undergraduate and Hornung enhances this with the undergraduate and sporting slang spiced into his speech. On the other hand, the stories evoke moral outrage. Raffles repels readers when they consider the implications of his speeches and attitudes, and the stories deliberately raise the gorge through Hornung's use of point of view.

As our estimation of Holmes increases because of Watson's decency, honesty, and humanity, so our estimation of Raffles sinks when we see him only through the eyes of Bunny. Bunny is, by any measure, naive, weak, and besotted. He is the pathetic eternal weakling who ignores even the vilest things he witnesses and joins the most despicable actions because he can only follow. He is, further, a sniveler and a kill-joy. We view Raffles solely from his perspective and this can only degrade the main character.

Additionally, the plots of the Raffles stories add to the character's unworthiness. Several stories tell of out-and-out failures of the hero, and in “The Gift of the Emperor,” Raffles and Bunny get caught with their hands in the till. “The Wrong House” results only in Raffles stories, only a minority reflects the sort of precision, style, and success which we find in less moral gentleman crook stories. The smash and grab job in “A Jubilee Present” is scarcely out of Topkapi, and Raffles' resolution to turn murderer in “Willful Murder” descends to Nazi mentality. In sum, Hornung made the Raffles stories so they charm, but he also made sure they bite.

If, in the story about the gentleman crook, the detective story taps into the tradition of the picaresque story, then in the story about the master criminal, detective fiction unites with the traditions and conventions of the romance. Although in the 1920's detective writers parodied and pilloried the master criminal story, it formed an important part of the mass of fiction publishers and readers viewed as detective fiction at the turn of the century. During the period, influential writers like Guy Boothby, L. T. Meade, Edgar Wallace, Sax Rohmer, and especially John Buchan, devoted themselves to the master criminal story. Sexton Blake (1893)—whose adventures, written by a stable of writers, appeared in The Union Jack—brought the master criminal story to countless lower class or underage readers in Britain just as the Nick Carter stories (1886) appealed to similar classes in the United States.

The master criminal story combines recognizable elements with a number of literary and social currents. It, of course, goes back to the gothic novel for the larger-than-life villain. These stories, however, refine the gothic hero through the filter of the sensation novel. Wilkie Collins' Count Fosco has plenty of sons and heirs in Boothby's Dr. Nikola (1895), Rohmer's Fu Manchu (1913), and Buchan's Blackstone (1915). Writers also took advantage of contemporary paranoias in building ever more fearsome master criminals. For one thing, the master criminal and his gang reflect turn-of-the-century anxieties about secret societies. The Camorra, the Black Hand, and international anarchists appear in standard detective writers, but they are paper trained as opposed to the malign presence of secret plots in the master criminal story. Master criminal stories, too, show the sinister obverse of the scientific story. Rather than exhibiting the genius' use of technology to build a better tomorrow, master criminals develop the mad scientist motif. These stories also make practical use of the vogue for the mystical and oriental which appeared at the turn-of-the-century. Scarcely a Napoleon of crime lacks quasi-mystical powers along with Oriental masters and a pack of alien servants, building up, of course, to Dr. Fu Manchu. Finally, the master criminal story responded in two ways to the contemporary detective story. First, the simple aesthetics of the tale of the great detective require his antagonist be either perverse circumstance which frames an inexplicable crime or the master criminal whose elaborate plans suitably test the mettle of the hero. Also, the master criminal story witnesses a reaction among popular writers against the extensive intellectual atmosphere of the contemporary detective story, along with a desire to join the elements of detection with the patterns of adventure which proved so successful in the books of Rider Haggard, Stevenson, and Anthony Hope.

These threads all combined to form the master criminal story, or, as it came to be known, the thriller. The key to these stories is the character of the villain. First of all, master criminals plan earth-shaking crimes. These people like Meade's Sorceress of the Strand (1902), want unlimited wealth, or, like Dr. Nikola, the modern equivalent of the elixir, or, like Fu Manchu or Buchan's Powerhouse (1913), world domination. Anyone, to be sure, can want these things, but the master criminal has the personality and organization to make success possible were the fictional world not governed by Providence. Drawing on Count Fosco, writers made their villains effete but magnetic, sophisticated but ruthless, suave and polite in small things but maniacal about large things. Master criminals also have large stocks of working capital, scientific genius, occult powers, and legions of yeggs and bruisers to do their dirty work.

Ranged against this avalanche of evil stand the hero and his associates. The associates exist, in the main, to be kidnapped, so the plot depends on the actions of the hero. In some important ways the heroes of these stories are detectives. Buchan's novels have cipher solving in them, the first Fu Manchu book contains a series of locked room murders, while Wallace's The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1916) has only one locked room murder. In fact, Guy Boothby's A Bid for Fortune or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta (1895) contains the original of one of the devices Jacques Futrelle used in his arch-intellectual story, “The Problem of Cell 13” (1907). Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie in the Fu Manchu yarns, as well as Sexton Blake, all look specifically back to Sherlock Holmes.

Part of the thriller hero's value comes from his ability to put two and two together, but more comes from his capacity for prompt action. Here the thriller hero differs from the detective hero. Dick Hatteras, in A Bid for Fortune, and Dick Hannay, in The Thirty Nine Steps (and several later novels), may be able to follow clues and solve problems, but they differ from conventional detectives in that they are average men who have experienced the real world of work, who have practical intelligence, and whose main strength is their commitment to decency and to the defense of it. In short, the master criminal's opponent is the end product of Victorian imperialism, and his ability to cope with the villain, who is usually a foreigner, proceeds from the principles of well-intentioned empire-building. Once we have the villain and the hero, the plotting of the master criminal story runs along traditional lines, showing confrontations which lead to a series of chases, captures, and escapes.

In some ways, the master criminal story became the most influential of the detective story products of the turn-of-the-century. It generated Sapper with his Bulldog Drummond, along with a host of other thriller writers in the twenties and thirties. It inspired Ian Fleming after World War II and became, in fact, one of the patterns for the spy novel. Regular detective writers, however, did not like thrillers. They laughed at their improbabilities and satirized their naivetee. Quick wits and even quicker fists seemed grotesquely out of place in the garden party world of the Golden Age of the detective story. The master criminal story, however, seems more relevant to the postwar world in which Hitler could almost succeed and cities can vanish in a sudden flash of light and heat.

In all parts of its development, the turn-of-the-century detective story was in international literary movement. While French writers of the period, like Leroux and Leblanc, carried through certain traditions of continental literature—the development of the picaro and the manner of Gaboriau, for instance—British and American writers wrote mostly in response to the British tradition. In large measure, too, these stories appealed to the same international English-speaking audience. The detective story market place was, however, a one way avenue: many British writers found American publishers, but few American stories appeared in Britain. A similar situation exists in criticism. Critics have generally ignored American writers or seen them as adjuncts of British detective fiction. To be sure, Americans did write plenty of inept, insipid, and derivative detective stories at the turn-of-the-century. The lugubrious nature of Pidgin and Taylor's The Chronicles of Quincy Adams Sawyer, Detective (1912) goes a long way toward proving this. Arthur B. Reeve's scientific stories also evince only a bumptiously naive fascination with technological toys. Nevertheless, Post, Futrelle, and Adams wrote detective stories as original, pleasing, and satisfying as their British counterparts, and American writers as a whole developed a range of themes which is absent in British detective fiction.

British detective stories at the turn of the century say very little about the nature of law enforcement. Most of them portray the bumbling policeman, but this comes from literary convention rather from any sort of social fervor. Bodkin and Barr voice a few complaints about Judges' Rules hampering effective investigation, but by and large, British stories never pretend to deal with real policemen or real police problems. American detective fiction, on the other hand, makes some powerful statements of the corruption, dishonesty, and ineptness of the police. In The Powers that Prey (1900), for example, Flynt and Walton present a grotesque indictment of police brutality, dishonesty, and perversion of the law. The American story of the period, in fact, shares many motives with muckraking journalism which went on at the same time. We can see this in American writers' frequent use of the corporation as villain. In Reeve, MacHarg and Balmer, Adams, and Francis Lynde, the real criminals are the railroads, the beef trust, the banks, or other assorted conglomerates, cartels, and monopolies. Along the same lines, American stories often turn to politics, and the same detectives who oppose the Robber Barons go after dirty politicians. Thus Reeve's “The Campaign Grafter” (1913) and Adams' “The One Best Bet” both deal with corrupt politicians. American detective stories display a few other incidental firsts. American writers, for instance, used Freud in their detective stories earlier and more frequently than their British fellows. The presence of real social issues, however, separates American from British detective writing. Granted, with a few rare exceptions, American writers simply insert the social statements in the conventional framework of the detective story. Their presence, however, stands in the background of the fully developed atmosphere and mood of resigned cynicism which provides part of the power for the hard-boiled story of the 1920s and 1930s.

Recognizing the role of the turn-of-the-century American detective story in the eventual development of hard-boiled fiction is an example of a process we can apply to all of the fiction of the period. As a whole, it displays fully developed, innovative, and sometimes sophisticated examples of detective story craft. The most talented writers of the period, like Chesterton, and even less talented writers like Freeman, inspired the detective writers of the next generation. Almost all of the concrete ingredients of Golden Age fiction reside somewhere in the work of turn-of-the-century writers. The writers exploited the various facets of Holmes more patiently and thoroughly than did Doyle, and they helped to heave the detective story further out of sentiment and sensation and toward the common world. Nevertheless, turn-of-the-century fiction did not take the giant steps which we find in British and American detective fiction of the 1920s, and even the real achievements went unnoticed because of the ephemeral nature of magazine publication. It was, in fact, magazine publication along with certain structural and narrative prejudices owing to Doyle and the Poe-Gaboriau tradition which effectively prevented turn-of-the-century fiction from developing further than it did.

Perhaps the outstanding fact about detective stories at the turn-of-the-century is just that—they are short stories. Few detective novels achieved any sort of real popularity and, indeed, compared with the mass of short fiction, few detective novels appeared. The long detective fiction of the period, with a very few exceptions, is windy, routine, and turgid. This does not mean, however, that writers did not try to expand the short story into the novel. They just stumbled over the difficulty of expanding over the length of a novel what is essentially a compact narrative knot, the problem and solution of a crime. The ghost of the three-volume novel complicated this problem, it being within the realm of possibility to make detective material into a vital short novel, but not a long novel given the self-imposed restrictions of subject, character, and theme. Doyle, as late as 1914, beat the dead horse of Gaboriau's novel structure in The Valley of Fear, but it did not work here just as it did not work in his early novels. Other writers experimented with the episode as a building block. Hume's Hagar of the Pawn Shop and Hanshew's Cleek's Government Cases (1916), both unite separate episodes with a frame story to produce a longer package of detective fiction. Some writers attempted to provide coherence to collected episodes by calling them memoirs, as in Barr's The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont (1906), but this did little to bring the short story to the novel. Thriller writers had a more cavalier approach. They simply inserted episodes of proper detection into the loose structure of the adventure novel.

While turn-of-the-century writers practiced these shifts, changes occurred which allowed the bona fide detective novel to begin. For one thing, assumptions about the size of the novel changed. During and after World War I, publishers were ready to accept shorter books, and readers did not invariably expect the triple decker novel invented for other kinds of readers in other times. The concept of leisure reading emerged, and the weekend book or the book for the train journey needed to be a reasonably short one. Secondly, the concept of the tightly constructed novel in high-brow literature suggested new methods and new models for the detective novelists of the 1920's. As a model, The Moonstone made a triumphant comeback. And finally, writers discovered the detective story knot itself contained opportunities for expansion, exclusive of multiple episodes or the inserted story. This, however, remained in the future.

The other element which restricted the development of the turn-of-the-century detective story was writers' basic conception of the mystery and readers' relationship to the mystery. Because of the speed at which they progress, short stories cannot do much with the careful development and exhibition of clues. The short detective story at the turn-of-the-century depends largely on traditional patterns of story-telling rather than following through on the idiosyncratic devices fashioned by Collins. Doyle wrestled with this and concluded the detective story unfolds a narrative rather than invites the readers' participation. Coupled with the dominance of the detective character, this means these short stories chiefly intend to advertise the detective's genius which the writer demonstrates by an apparently wonderful conclusion, but which the detective either pulls out of a hat or which is admirable only because there is no opportunity given for alternate solutions. Writers give few options. Further, writers at the turn of the century use very little narrative trickery which becomes a standard mark of the detective story in the next generation. Devices like Futrelle's murderer narrator in “The Mystery of Room 666” (1910) stand out from the usual conventional narration of the period. This device, in fact, stands out so much critics could view it as a shocking innovation when Christie used it in 1926.

At best, typical turn-of-the-century fiction, if it is a guessing game at all, resembles a rigged guessing game in which the author adds significant facts at the end to astonish the reader. Guessing games had much to do with the Golden Age novel, but turn-of-the-century writers could not properly adapt their tone or correctly gauge the perspicacity of their audience. This showed in the mailbags full of correct answers sent to Edgar Wallace when he ran a contest for the person who could correctly identify the murder weapon in The Four Just Men. Likewise, turn-of-the-century writers never added more than verisimilitude in the maps, drawings, and architectural plans they included in their stories.

The detective story at the turn of the century represents the term transitional in its fullest sense: the works look both backward and to the future and are significant in themselves. Turn-of-the-century tales reject some of the grosser forms of sentiment cultivated by Gaboriau and Doyle. Even though they cling to the concept of the great detective, they tone him down or do what Holmes constantly tells Watson to do, use him to illustrate mental processes. The writers of the period display a healthy deviousness in their invention of complex crimes and crime situations. This, too, escapes form Holmes and looks forward to the cuckoo complexities of the Golden Age book. They display, as well, some notable instances of wit and comedy. But most of these things were forgotten with the magazines which contained them. Fiction of the period also suffers from Doyle's semi-regular returns to detective writing: each new series of Sherlock Holmes stories robbed the newer writers of deserved attention. Writers also suffered from publishers' exploitation of thrillers. Booming thrillers as mysteries or detective stories misled and infuriated many readers. Wordsworth and Coleridge were not the first writers to think about nature or about simple folk—they were just the first Englishmen to talk about them. The same holds true of Golden Age detective writers: they, in a sense, talked about those things which mute inglorious detective writers were doing at the turn-of-the-century.