Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction

P. Bedore

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137288646
• eBook ISBN: 9781137288653
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This book reveals subversive representations of gender, race and class in detective dime novels (1860-1915), arguing that inherent tensions between subversive and conservative impulses—theorized as contamination and containment—explain detective fiction's ongoing popular appeal to readers and to writers such as Twain and Faulkner.

1

The Case of the Missing Detectives; or, Reassessing the American Contribution to Detective Fiction

Introduction

In the 1920s, many New Magnet Library reprints of Nick Carter detective novels included marketing copy that evokes several of the issues central to the exploration of American contributions to detective fiction:

In the old days, anything between paper covers was a dime novel and, therefore, to be avoided as cheap and contaminating.

Since men like Frank O’Brien have pointed out to the world the fact that some of the best literature in the English language first appeared between paper covers, such books are welcomed in the best of families. (back-cover blurb, excerpted)

Taken as a whole, this statement contains a certain desperation, a yearning for respectability by a mass-produced popular text within a marketplace it dominates commercially. The rhetoric of this advertising material suggests that the contamination associated with dime novels can be contained by scholarly acceptance. O’Brien, a New York City dentist, was an early dime novel collector whose personal collection became the core of the first major dime novel collection to be held by an institution.¹ Hardly a household name even in the 1920s when this copy appeared, O’Brien’s recommendation of the paper-covered dime novels represents a metafictional slippage, calling upon exactly the rags-to-riches rhetoric that made so popular the Horatio Alger dime novels as these novels, like Alger’s street urchins, make the journey from the streets into the ‘best’ households. And yet, this blurb appears not on a novel narrating a poor boy’s meteoric rise to success through his own hard work and his unwavering belief in the American Dream writ large, but rather on a series featuring Nick Carter, the most prolific of all dime novel detectives and thus a figure whose success, even more than that of Alger’s protagonists, depends on his liminality, his ability to negotiate multiple identities and to be welcomed not only by ‘the best of families,’ but, perhaps more importantly, by the worst of lowlifes, by the ruffians – rich and poor – whose criminal acts threaten the city of New York.

Dime novels, the blurb tells us, were once considered ‘cheap’ and ‘contaminating.’ In fact, there was no need for the past tense in the 1920s when this blurb appeared, or even in the 1950s, when A. E. Murch used this and other marketing copy as evidence that the Nick Carter dime novels are interchangeable and homogeneous, lacking moral complexity and character development, ultimately ‘without literary value’ (139). It is perhaps no surprise that the genre of detective fiction, with its fundamental interest in negotiating tensions around various forms of criminality, experienced its first mass instantiation in the dime novels, themselves viewed as rife with threats to readers, who could be contaminated by their exposure to stories of criminality and surveillance. Indeed, dime novel publishers often claimed that their products presented uncomplicated moral messages in order to avoid censorship that was costly and sometimes even resulted in arrest. Just as Nick Carter muses about the thin line between detective and criminal attributes in order to finally laud the detective, so too does the dime novel industry acknowledge and attempt to contain its potential dangers, partly through back-cover blurbs like this one that simultaneously assure dime novel readers that the novel they are about to read contains the titillation previously called ‘contamination’ while also assuring censors that this contamination is relegated to the past.

Detective fiction, this book argues, functions through a careful balancing of tensions around potentially contaminating threats and the narrative strategies used to contain them. Indeed, there is something uncanny about detective fiction. It appears to be one of the more formulaic of the genre fictions – compared to science fiction or horror, for example – yet the sheer volume of scholarly attention it receives demonstrates that much remains to be understood about its formulas. Over the past six or seven decades, the ‘rules’ of the genre have been written and rewritten, and the appeal of the genre has generated more potential explanations than occur in even the most convoluted of detective narratives; indeed, the pleasures of scholarship about detective fiction mirror and echo the pleasures of the fiction itself. And detective fiction is a bit like pornography in that you have a hard time defining it, but you know it when you see it: the genre includes quite disparate subgenres that seem to bear little resemblance to each other but that nonetheless reside under the umbrella of detective fiction.

Many studies of detective fiction are organized on a now-familiar history of the genre that takes us to America in the 1840s, where Poe wrote his three detective short stories, giving us the masterful and effete C. Auguste Dupin as a prototypical detective and laying out the early rules of ‘ratiocination.’ Poe’s stories contain the seeds of many features of the genre still alive today, and these three tales have often been seen as the sum of America’s contribution to nineteenth-century detective fiction, with the genre lying dormant for almost fifty years until the introduction in 1887 of a tall, thin, cocaine-addicted, violin-playing detective working out of 221B Baker Street in London. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes are generally seen as the two pedestals upon which twentieth-century detective fiction rests: the genre develops the ‘golden age’ or ‘classic’ puzzle stories nurtured mostly in England, moves to the edgy and morally conflicted hardboiled tales born in 1920s California, and on to the police procedurals set in metropolitan areas in both America and Britain in the 1950s, landing in the 1970s on the ‘detectives of diversity’ that are part of the postmodern detective’s concern with all manner of questions of identity, with an especially robust development of women detectives. Out of a fairly stark geographical distinction that awards Brits with the puzzle and Americans with the hardboiled, post-World War II detective fiction is characterized by its global reach.

This literary-historical narrative of detective fiction is attractive in that it allows us to organize into a single chronicle a number of texts that do not appear to have all that much in common. Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Stephanie Plum, and Andy Sipowicz are all recognizable heroes of the genre, but they inhabit substantially different worlds – geographically, historically, epistemologically, and aesthetically. When we look at the entire genre, then, we are faced with a conundrum in which even basic questions about how the genre functions and why it is so appealing to readers and writers alike generate different answers based on the particular subgenre under examination. In classical detective narratives, for example, the pleasures of the genre seem to reside in the highly rule-based and rational competition between detective and reader, while in hardboiled texts the genre appears to provide a vicarious thrill to readers who enjoy watching a tough detective get beaten up physically and emotionally before emerging, not entirely victorious, from the corrupt underbelly of the city. Or perhaps, as Robert Rushing compellingly argues, our enjoyment is based on the tedious repetition that is thoroughly detailed in the police procedurals currently so popular on TV as well as in serial novels.

This familiar narrative overlooks the diverse pleasures of detective fiction, which can be illuminated by an investigation of the genre’s nascence and of America’s second major contribution, following Poe’s seminal Dupin tales. Let us consider the supposedly stagnant period between Poe and the hardboiled in America, focusing on the fictional detectives who populated thousands of dime novels published between the late 1870s and the dime novel’s demise in 1915.² These detectives are not entirely unknown, of course, as they are at the center of studies like Gary Hoppenstand’s The Dime Novel Detective and Michael Denning’s Mechanic Accents. But they are often treated as a cultural phenomenon rather than as literary works, as in excellent recent studies, like those by Christopher Breu and Charles Rzepka, who make a nod to the thousands of detective narratives published in American dime novels without engaging individual detective characters or even series. What were these detective novels like? To which subgenres of detective fiction did they contribute most significantly? How might we explain the incredible predominance of detective narratives amongst the dime novels that developed all the major genre fictions, including romance, Western, adventure, and even science fiction? Why are they virtually absent from the scholarship on detective fiction?

This book attempts to unravel the case of the purloined detective stories (which are hiding in plain view), arguing that doing so disrupts several existing critical narratives and suggests new answers to some questions grappled with by scholars of both detective fiction and American literature. Reexamining the relationship between popular texts and their historical moment, for example, can explain why the roots – and sometimes even early flowers – of every subgenre of detective fiction can be found in the dime novels, which contain examples of classical, hardboiled, police, postmodern, and diverse detective fiction. This study contributes to the ongoing interdisciplinary conversation about the appeal of detective fiction, proposing that even from its earliest mass-produced instantiations, the detective figure maintains a precarious balance between tropes of contamination and containment. It is the finely-tuned fragility of this pendulum between moral and material danger and safety that is craved by detective readers as well as by writers like Mark Twain and William Faulkner, who were continuously drawn to the tropes used in detective dime novels despite the modest acclaim their own detective writing achieved. For both Twain and Faulkner, the balance between contamination and containment surrounding the detective ‘hero’ provides powerful analogies to and intersections with two of their central concerns: a young man’s move from innocence to experience, and race relations. Closely examining detective dime novels illuminates the function and appeal of the detective genre not only for readers, but also for writers, including two of America’s most prominent men of letters.

Construing the absence of the dime novel detective

The early absence of dime novels from scholarly work on detective fiction is no mystery: their material features laid the foundation for both their run-away market success and their almost complete omission – until recently – from most serious studies of detective fiction. As popular literature quickly produced on cheap paper, dime novels were devoured by their multi-faceted readership and almost as quickly became part of the ephemera of nineteenth-century American culture. Indeed, over 50,000 dime novels were published between 1860 and 1915, and at a cost of five, ten, or fifteen cents each, individual titles were seldom preserved in systematic ways.³ Dime novels were sold largely in bookstalls and train stations or by individual subscription rather than to lending libraries, so although many American homes of the early twentieth century would have contained stacks of dime novels, research libraries did not become involved in organizing and cataloging them until they were no longer in print. The sheer number of dime novels, along with a general problem of accessing them, helps explain their early exclusion from studies of American literature.

It is important to note, too, that dime novels – especially those featuring detectives – were highly controversial in their day. In debates rhetorically similar to those that followed the widespread popularity of comic books and television, nineteenth-century educators and government officials were split in their understandings of the moral impact of dime novels on the youth. Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), self-acclaimed ‘scourge of the dime novel,’ became both a spokesperson for and a symbol of their censorship during his long reign as Post-Office Inspector and as Secretary and Chief Special Agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Mocked and derided but nonetheless feared, Comstock held real power: he was personally responsible for the arrests of more than 3,600 people, including dime novel publisher Frank Tousey, and he destroyed thousands of volumes of cheap fiction (Bremner, xi). In Traps for the Young (1883), Comstock characterized dime novels as ‘death-traps’ and ‘literary poison’ (42), arguing that ‘[e]vil reading debases, degrades, perverts, and turns away from lofty aims to follow examples of corruption and criminality’ (5). Comstock argued that exposure to immoral materials such as those published in newspapers and dime novels could be linked directly to adolescent criminality, citing as evidence numerous cases in which young boys who had committed crimes were also readers of newspapers and popular fiction.⁴ For twenty-first-century scholars steeped in the theoretical frameworks of cultural studies, the controversy around dime novels makes them more enticing as objects of serious scrutiny, but their widespread disparagement probably did not recommend them to earlier literary critics.

Some of the earliest scholarship on popular literature and culture mentions dime novels only briefly as it tries to carve out a respectable niche for various genre fictions, and Nick Carter’s market prominence and development of detective conventions often allowed him to stand in for all dime novel detectives. For example, Howard Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure (1941) states that detective fiction in American lay ‘fallow’ between Poe and Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case (1878), ‘Unless the reader is prepared to admit Nick Carter and his confreres and the semi-fictional Pinkerton reminiscences and their ilk to the dignity of detective novels’ (83).⁵ Similarly, A. E. Murch’s 1958 treatment mentions Nick Carter only in passing, deeming him ‘the detective of the uneducated’ (149). For Murch, late nineteenth-century detective fiction was on a ‘downward trend’ until Sherlock Holmes saved it (145). Even Edmund Pearson, whose full-length study, Dime Novels; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature (1929), presents a much more open-minded examination of dime novels than does most criticism of the day, describes Nick Carter as one-dimensional. Pearson provides lengthy quotations from Nick Carter novels, situating the detective as partly responsible for the dime novel’s eventual move to limited respectability, but his examples of Carter at work fail to engage his most compelling features, since Pearson focuses on Nick as ‘a return to virtue’ (210). These judgments of the iconic Nick Carter as either too formulaic or too dull for serious study have been accepted by most detective scholars until quite recently.

A similar trend occurred in work on the Western, which also developed several of its conventions in the dime novel industry. Henry Nash Smith devotes a considerable portion of his landmark 1950 study of the American West to the dime novels but, like Haycraft and Murch in their roughly contemporaneous studies of detective heroes, Smith accepts as fact the marketing ploy of dime novel publishers, who deliberately packaged these narratives in clearly branded series to look interchangeable. In considering the allegedly formulaic nature of dime novels, Smith argues that scholarly interest should be limited to understanding their articulation of cultural fantasies and their ability to capture ‘the dream life of a vast inarticulate public’ (92). For Smith, dime novels lose even their value as a barometer of cultural desire when they become increasingly sensationalized in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, thus moving them away from accurate representations of the popular imagination. The tension between formula and sensation – between repetition and novelty – that underlies Smith’s claims about Western dime novels can be seen in dime novel detective stories as well. Indeed, the value of dime novels for better understanding the nature of detective fiction lies as much in the deviations as in the formulas. By charting some of the more blatant injections of diversity into early detective narratives – whether at the sites of gender, race, or even disability – we can map the territory of early detective fiction and better understand the genre’s potentials as well as its limitations. As Smith notes, a typical early dime novel had a print run of 60,000 copies, with reprints available for the most popular titles (90–1). We might productively ask: what kinds of detective formulas – and variations on those formulas – could sustain a loyal fan base week after week for about forty years? Do those early tropes still exist within today’s explosion of detective narratives in books, movies, and television series? Can examining dime novel detective stories help us understand the continuing appeal of this enormously popular genre?

The moment has come to address these questions seriously. Throughout the twentieth century, dime novels were difficult to study for any scholar who did not have access to a major research collection specializing in nineteenth-century American popular literature. Even with such access, it remains difficult for scholars to know where to start when faced with thousands of paperback or microfilmed volumes, all deliberately branded to look as similar as possible. J. Randolph Cox’s The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book (2000) provides a basic topography of the complex landscape, introducing major series and characters with highly usable cross-referencing. Recent new editions now render some specific dime novels teachable,⁶ and recent projects of digitizing dime novels and their tantalizing cover art, make this a perfect time to use Cox’s careful bibliographical work as a diving-board into more theoretically reflective analyses of dime novels.

Twentieth-century scholarship on dime novels tends to focus not on individual texts, but on series or even genres.⁷ The broad lens offers much to cultural historians, but the notion that individual dime novels are interchangeable has obscured the fascinating inventiveness of specific works in this long neglected literary archive. As we shall see in Chapter 2 when we read the endings of 115 dime novels from the New York Detective Library series, although some dime novels are indeed poorly written and formulaic, others contain well-developed detective characters as varied as those found on the shelves today. Indeed, the fact that many dime novel detectives anticipate developments generally associated with much later historical periods – the hardboiled detective, the police procedural, various detectives of diversity, and even some postmodern detective moves – suggests that emerging popular genres go beyond the anxieties of their historical moment.

Michael Denning’s important study of dime novels, Mechanic Accents (1987), has ensured their mention in many studies of detective fiction over the past two dec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 The Case of the Missing Detectives; or, Reassessing the American Contribution to Detective Fiction
• 2 The Happy-Ending Deception; or, Uncovering the Subversive Potential of Detective Dime Novels
• 3 The Case of the Contaminated Icon; or, Allan Pinkerton’s Dangerous Detective Doubles
• 4 Playing with the Ace of Hearts; or, Mentorship, Sportsmanship, and Nick Carter’s Epistemological Dilemmas
• 5 Faulkner, Twain, and the Legacy of Dime Novel Detectives
• 6 Conclusions and Directions for Future Research
• Appendix Tables
• Notes
• References
• Index