LIFE OF CRIME EB

Martin Edwards

• Publisher: Collins Crime Club
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008192440
• eBook ISBN: 9780008192457
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Winner of four major prizes for the best critical/biographical book related to crime fiction: the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and H.R.F. Keating Awards; and shortlisted for both the Agatha and Gold Dagger Awards.

'Martin Edwards is the closest thing there has been to a philosopher of crime writing.' The Times

In the first major history of crime fiction in fifty years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world's most popular form of fiction.

Author Martin Edwards is a multi-award-winning crime novelist, the President of the Detection Club, archivist of the Crime Writers' Association and series consultant to the British Library's highly successful series of crime classics, and therefore uniquely qualified to write this book. He has been a widely respected genre commentator for more than thirty years, winning the CWA Diamond Dagger for making a significant contribution to crime writing in 2020, when he also compiled and published Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club and the novel Mortmain Hall. His critically acclaimed The Golden Age of Murder (Collins Crime Club, 2015) was a landmark study of Detective Fiction between the wars.

The Life of Crime is the result of a lifetime of reading and enjoying all types of crime fiction, old and new, from around the world. In what will surely be regarded as his magnum opus, Martin Edwards has thrown himself undaunted into the breadth and complexity of the genre to write an authoritative – and readable – study of its development and evolution. With crime fiction being read more widely than ever around the world, and with individual authors increasingly the subject of extensive academic study, his expert distillation of more than two centuries of extraordinary books and authors – from the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann to the novels of Patricia Cornwell – into one coherent history is an extraordinary feat and makes for compelling reading.

ONE

Revolution

Origins

‘Terror was the order of the day; and it was feared that even the humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor.’

William Godwin wrote the above words in 1795, a year after publishing what today we would call his ‘breakthrough novel’. His story explored the unravelling of a crime.

Despite what he claimed, Godwin was far from humble. Contrary by nature, he’d spent four years as a dissenting minister before his thirst for argument led him into radical politics. A friend of Thomas Paine, one of the US’s founding fathers, he was an anarchist inspired by the French Revolution, although even he had begun to wonder by this point if the enthusiastic guillotining of the rich and powerful was getting out of hand.

Ten years as an author had left Godwin disillusioned: ‘Everything I wrote fell dead-born from the press.’ He craved ‘the undoubted stamp of originality’, and so came up with the idea of ‘a book … that should in some way be distinguished by a very powerful interest … a series of adventures of flight and pursuit; the fugitive in perpetual apprehension of being overwhelmed by the worst calamities’. The result was the first thriller about a manhunt, and the literary ancestor of chase novels from John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, published during the First World War, to Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal (1971) and Lee Child thrillers such as A Wanted Man (2012).

To make readers care about his protagonist’s fate, Godwin made him play for high stakes. He devised ‘a secret murder, to the investigation of which the innocent victim should be impelled by an unconquerable spirit of curiosity. The murderer would thus have a sufficient motive to persecute the unhappy discoverer, that he might deprive him of peace, character, and credit, and have him for ever in his power.’

Godwin had invented a storytelling method that many detective novelists would later adopt. He constructed his plot by working backwards. Recalling the process in 1832, he said that he only wrote ‘when the afflatus was upon me’. This is seldom a recipe for success. Most writers find the afflatus, or divine inspiration, as elusive as any fugitive on the run. He finished the book in a year, mostly writing in ‘a state of high excitement’.

Godwin paid close attention to point of view, abandoning early pages written in the third person in favour of the immediacy of first-person narration. Some authors, fearful of subconscious influences and accusations of plagiarism, avoid reading books relevant to their own work while they are writing. Godwin had no such qualms.

He pored over the Newgate Calendar,[1] with its vivid and highly popular if lavishly embellished accounts of actual crimes. The gaol breaks and use of disguise in his story drew on the criminal career of Jack Sheppard, while Dick Turpin’s gang of highwaymen provided a template for Godwin’s band of outlaws. Another influence was the folk tale of Bluebeard, which had roots in stories about murderers such as the fifteenth-century Breton serial killer Gilles de Rais. For Godwin: ‘Falkland was my Bluebeard … Caleb Williams … persisted in his attempt to discover the forbidden secret.’

In April 1794, he completed work on his ‘mighty trifle’, but doubts of a kind familiar to most authors assailed him: ‘How terribly unequal does it appear to me … What had I done? Written a book to amuse boys and girls in their vacant hours, a story to be hastily gobbled up by them, swallowed in a pusillanimous and unanimated mood.’

Godwin gave his book the soporific title Things As They Are, but almost forty years after first publication, it had become known by the subtitle The Adventures of Caleb Williams. He’d finally realised that the appeal of his novel lay in his hero’s quest for truth, rather than in the political prejudices that drove him to write it.

Godwin set out to present ‘a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man’, and his explanatory preface so alarmed booksellers that it was withdrawn. Publication coincided with the suspension of habeas corpus by William Pitt the Younger’s government, allowing arrest or imprisonment on ‘suspicion’, without charges or a trial. A reviewer in the pro-establishment British Critic said that Godwin’s book provided ‘a striking example of the evil use that can be made of considerable talents’.[2]

In Godwin’s story, young Caleb Williams becomes secretary to an amiable country squire, Falkland, who had previously been acquitted of the murder of an obnoxious neighbour called Barnabas Tyrell. Two other men were hanged for the crime, but Caleb suspects that Falkland has something to hide. As a result of his amateur sleuthing, he is dismissed, thrown into prison, and then pursued by Falkland and his brutal henchman, Gines. Having framed others for his crime, Falkland is belatedly assailed by a guilty conscience. For Godwin, the real culprit is the society that bred his behaviour.

Falkland’s virtues make him a forerunner of the ‘least likely suspect’, so often revealed as the murderer in later whodunits. Godwin had stumbled on the question asked by writers of detective fiction and psychological suspense ever since: whom can I trust?

Caleb Williams sold well. The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan oversaw a stage-musical version, written by George Colman and with songs by Stephen Storace, retitled The Iron Chest in an attempt to evade censorship. A generation after the book’s first appearance, William Hazlitt, essayist and critic, claimed that ‘no one that ever read it could possibly forget it’, but present-day crime fans may struggle to wade through Godwin’s muddy prose. P. D. James described the book in her memoirs as ‘unreadable’.

Julian Symons argued plausibly that the book was the first to strike ‘the characteristic note of crime literature’, but was on shakier ground when he claimed that the book’s ‘particular importance … is that it denies all the assertions to be made later through the detective story. In the detective story, the rule of law is justified as an absolute good, in Godwin’s book it is seen as wholly evil.’ If one reads between the lines of the best detective stories, their attitudes towards law and justice are often more subversive than Symons and other critics realised.

William Godwin was an unlikely crime novelist. Born in 1756 in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, scarcely a hot-bed of murder and mayhem, or indeed revolutionary fervour, he was educated in London prior to becoming a minister. An armchair revolutionary, his attitudes and behaviour were mired in contradictions. Godwin was a religious man who became an atheist, a preacher about economics who was hopeless with money, and an advocate of female independence who was enraged when his daughter ran off with a poet.

Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft at a dinner given by his publisher for Thomas Paine. She departed for France, and had a relationship with an American businessman by whom she had a daughter. After the father of her child deserted her, she returned to England, and renewed her acquaintance with Godwin. The couple married and Mary gave birth to a second daughter, also called Mary, on 30 August 1797, but died ten days later.

Grief-stricken, Godwin wrote Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Mary had published her early polemic of feminist theory five years before her death), but his honesty was counter-productive. Too many people saw Mary as a fallen woman, rather than a shining example of intellectual feminism. In 1801, he married again. His second wife was a publisher of juvenile fiction, and before long the couple were bringing up five children, and battling to stave off financial disaster.

Help arrived in the improbable form of young Percy Bysshe Shelley. He introduced himself to Godwin, and, despite his own lack of money, borrowed on the strength of an expected inheritance to help pay off the older man’s debts. Shelley was married, but became infatuated with young Mary; when she was sixteen, they eloped to France. Godwin disapproved, although the death of Shelley’s wife enabled the couple to marry. But Mary later dedicated her novel Frankenstein to her father; and Godwin also became her literary agent, though declined to help with her novella Matilda, perhaps because its subject was father–daughter incest. It remained unpublished until 1959.

A few years on from publication, Caleb Williams inspired the American magazine editor and novelist Charles Brockden Brown[3] to write Arthur Mervyn, published in two parts in 1799 and 1800. Again the story concerned a young man’s misadventures as he tries to discover the truth about a concealed murder; the emphasis is on suspense rather than detection.

An English melodrama, Pelham (1828), by Edward Bulwer-Lytton,[4] also contains elements reminiscent of Caleb Williams, but stripped of the political agenda. A real-life murderer, John Thurtell,[5] influenced the portrayal of Thornton, the fictional killer. And Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel, Eugene Aram (1832), centred on an eighteenth-century murder that Godwin had once contemplated fictionalising.

Godwin kept writing, but became an early example of publishing’s eternal realities: today’s hot property is tomorrow’s has-been. By the time he died in 1836, according to his biographer Peter Marshall, ‘he was virtually unknown except to a small coterie of intellectuals’. His finances remained in a parlous state. And three years before his death, this scourge of society’s parasites solicited the sinecure of Office Keeper and Yeoman-Usher of the Receipt of the Exchequer. A proposal to abolish the post prompted the old anarchist to beg the new Tory Prime Minister, Robert Peel,[6] to allow him to stay on the gravy train. Peel agreed, citing a ‘grateful Recollection of the Pleasure’ he’d taken in Godwin’s writings.

In his strengths and weaknesses, his passions and his hypocrisies, Godwin was all too human. His career, as with so many later crime novelists, had more troughs than peaks. But, with Caleb Williams, he sparked a literary revolution.

How deep are the roots of the mystery story? Literature about crime dates back to the tale of Cain and Abel, while Oedipus Rex is a dark domestic psychodrama. Some believe that, if William Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be earning a crust as a crime writer, and Macbeth is indeed occasionally described as a ‘psychological thriller’. Modern crime fiction, however, is far removed from the ancient riddles and accounts of murder and mayhem, whether in the West or in the venerable Chinese court-case (gong’an) stories, which are occasionally seen as prefiguring the modern genre.

Dorothy L. Sayers, whose critical insights were as influential in the first half of the twentieth century as Julian Symons’ in the second half, made a valiant effort to identify the first four detective stories as ancient classics, two from the Apocrypha of the early Christian Church, one Greek, and one Roman. She argued that the biblical tale of Susanna and the Elders dealt with ‘analysis of testimony’, while, in Bel and the Dragon, also part of the extended Book of Daniel, ‘the science of deduction from material clues, in the popular Scotland Yard manner, is reduced to its simplest expression’. The story of Egyptian King Rhampsinitus,[7] meanwhile, as told in Herodotus, concerned ‘psychological detection’, and that of Hercules and Cacus in the Aeneid ‘fabrication of false clues’. But as Symons pointed out, these four stories focus on ‘natural cunning rather than detective skill’. The various tricks in The Arabian Nights, and in Chaucer’s ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, are equally remote from the detective story.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, John Reynolds’ The Triumph of God’s Revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of (Willful and Premeditated) Murther enjoyed enormous popularity. As the American scholar Douglas G. Greene has pointed out, it comprised ‘stories of murder that in later times would have been investigated by detectives and tried in the courts, but the theme … was that God will punish murderers’.

Change came with the Enlightenment. Daniel Defoe, best remembered for Robinson Crusoe (1719), wrote what would now be called ‘true crime’, including a pamphlet about the infamous aforementioned Jack Sheppard, thief and prison escapee,[8] as well as fiction. Roxana (1724), with elements of pursuit and the threat of murder, anticipates the crime novel, although Defoe’s main concern is to make a moral point. Reginald Hill, a leading British detective novelist, argued that ‘Defoe is not a crime writer in the modern sense, but as a writer on criminal matters, his importance and influence cannot be overstressed.’

In Voltaire’s Zadig (1747), the title character makes brilliant deductions from physical evidence, almost in the manner of a Great Detective. This reflects, Greene argues, ‘the assumption of the Enlightenment that humans can find answers through reason.’ It was no longer enough to wait for God.

Published in the same year as Caleb Williams, Ann Radcliffe’s[9] The Mysteries of Udolpho is a Gothic tale in which the villainous Montoni seeks to deprive Emily St Aubert of her inheritance. Thirty years earlier, Horace Walpole had produced The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, set in medieval Sicily, and his lurid thriller prompted Radcliffe and others to purs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Revolution
• 2 Mystery and Imagination
• 3 Guilty Secrets
• 4 Detective Fever
• 5 Poacher Turned Gamekeeper
• 6 The Great Detective
• 7 Rogues’ Gallery
• 8 The Nature of Evil
• 9 Plot Minds
• 10 The Science of Detection
• 11 Had-I-But-Known
• 12 War and Peace
• 13 Treacherous Impulses
• 14 The Mistress of Deception
• 15 American Tragedy
• 16 Superfluous Women
• 17 Challenging the Reader
• 18 Locked Rooms
• 19 The Long Arm of the Law
• 20 Blood-Simple
• 21 Murder and its Motives
• 22 Twists of Fate
• 23 The Sound of Mystery
• 24 In Lonely Rooms
• 25 Brothers in Crime
• 26 Cracks in the Wall
• 27 Sensation in Court
• 28 California Dreaming
• 29 Carnival of Crime
• 30 Waking Nightmares
• 31 Dagger of the Mind
• 32 Whose Body?
• 33 Private Wounds
• 34 Out of this World
• 35 Perfect Murders
• 36 Mind Games
• 37 Deep Water
• 38 Forking Paths
• 39 Bloody Murder
• 40 People with Ghosts
• 41 Killing Jokes
• 42 Literary Agents
• 43 Nerve
• 44 Outsider in Amsterdam
• 45 Whodunwhat?
• 46 Black and Blue
• 47 Home Discomforts
• 48 Mystery Games
• 49 Early Graves
• 50 A Suitable Job for a Woman
• 51 A Feeling for Snow
• 52 Fatal Inversions
• 53 Dark Places
• 54 Long Shadows
• 55 A Taste for Death
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index of Titles
• Index of Names
• Subject Index
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