The Great Detectives

An investigation of the modern mysterystory and its fascination to devoteesthe world over, in which we attempt tounravel the puzzle of why Sherlock Holmes,Inspector Maigret and the rest should livealthough they were never born...

[] The cookbook called for white instead of redwine in the coq-au-vin, with just a drop of sloe gin15 minutes before serving. The author, Frenchfood critic Robert Courtine, explained that this iswhat Madame Maigret prepares and ~simmerswith love" for her husband Jules, better knownto detective story fanciers around the world asChief Inspector Maigret of the Paris police. Cour-tine had pieced the recipe together from referencesin several Maigret stories. Since Madame Maigretis from Alsace, he specified an Alsatian Tramingerboth in the sauce and to be drunk with the dish.

The use of the present tense in the recipe isinstructive in that it shows how certain literarycreations can loom so large in our minds as tobecome virtual living persons. Every reader of theMaigret stories knows that Maigret is frequentlydetained from sitting down to his wife’s deliciousofferings by the untimely demands of his work.Readers also know that Madame Maigret keepsa tight rein on her patience when this happens.They sympathize with both of them; she in herkitchen with the dinner over-cooking, he sittingwith his stomach grumbling in a car on someshabby side-street waiting to confront a suspect.To Maigret enthusiasts, the Chief Inspector andhis good wife are alive and--apart from theoccasional bout of indigestion -- well.

In the world of detective fiction Maigret standswith the great Sherlock Holmes himself on that

transcendental plateau of literature where theirfictional doings are, to the reader, intimate reality.We have come into their households just as theyhave come into ours- in Holmes’s case a verystrange household indeed.

It has been said, though with no such definitiveproof as the subject himself would demand, thatSherlock Holmes is the best-known character inall of English literature. He is a member of thatmost exclusive group of imaginative creationswho have outlived not only their creators, buttheir era. Through films, radio, television andcomic strips, the peculiarities of Holmes’s person-ality are known to vast numbers of people whohave never read the original Holmes stories. Inwhat must be the ultimate test of immortality,many madmen evidently believe they are SherlockHolmes.

This probably would have pleased his creator,Arthur Conan Doyle, a spiritualist who dabbledin the ways of immortality. Conan Doyle hugelyenjoyed the game of persuading readers thatHolmes was a real, if somewhat.shadowy, humanbeing. He did this by deftly scattering referencesto actual persons and events throughout hisstories. Their tongues in their cheeks, Holmesscholars are only too happy to keep the game goingto this day.

The first thing they will tell you is that theHolmes stories were not written by Conan Doyle

at all, but by a rather stuffy but good-naturedchap named Dr. Watson. Sherlock Holmes societieseverywhere (and they are everywhere) operate onthe elementary premise that Holmes and hisapostle really did make their headquarters intheir lodgings at 212B Baker Street. The addressdoes not exist now, but they explain that is be-cause of demolition and rebuilding since Holmes’sand Watson’s heyday. It is reported that the firmwhich occupies the nearest number to 212B regu-larly receives mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes.

So, long after the last hackney vanished fromthe gaslit streets of London, Sherlock Holmes stillstrides conceitedly across the stage of fancy, prac-tising what Watson called his speciality- omni-science. Since Conan Doyle’s copyright finallylapsed a few years ago, new books and films aboutHolmes’s adventures by other authors have beenappearing regularly, supposedly culled from hith-erto-undiscovered documents. Holmes is stillcapable of bowling over readers and audienceswith the might of his mental processes. He is doingvery well for a man of 125 years of age.

What is it that makes fictional detectives, aboveall literary figures, live on agelessly in our imagi-nations? A conversation among any group ofmystery story fans- which means almost anygroup of people who like to read for relaxation-will turn up endless minutia about the lives ofcharacters who never existed in the strict sense ofthe word. You might hear about how Charlie Channot only has a number of sons but a daughter;about how Hercule Poirot once failed to tell some-one who thought he was French that he was reallyBelgian; about how Nero Wolfe might just beSherlock Holmes’s illegitimate son, the issue of aliaison between the great detective and a forgottenlady long ago in Montenegro (the clue is thesimilarity in the spelling of the two names; notethe identical vowels).

In at least one instance a fictional detective maybe found slipping into this state of mind himself,with the curious effect that his excursions into

unreality lend him a special air of reality. Inspec-tor Van der Valk of the Amsterdam police, thecreation of author Nicholas Freeling, is an avidreader of Maigret stories. He often wonders whenfaced with a particularly difficult problem whatMaigret would do in a case like this.

Obviously the lasting appeal of the imaginarydetectives has much to do with the type of storyin which they are the leading players. Everybodyloves a mystery. Small children are enthralledby the mysterious, hence their passion for riddlesand hide-and-seek. Adults tend to like puzzles ofall kinds, none more than the puzzle of who isresponsible for the corpse on the drawing-roomfloor.

Other heroes come and go, butdetectives go on forever

In common with characters in comic strips andtelevision serials and situation comedies, fictionalsleuths owe at least part of their familiarity tothe fact that they keep appearing in one storyafter another. But while the other types soon fadefrom memory when their stint in the limelight isover, the detectives retain their prominencethrough constant retellings of their adventures inreprinted paperback books and fresh adaptationsfor television, film and the stage.

Yet, despite the fact that no lesser a literaryfigure than Edgar Allan Poe is credited withwriting the first modern detective stories and suchsplendid writers as Dashiell Hammett and Ray-mond Chandler have specialized in them, detec-tive fiction is still not fully recognized as a seriousart form. The more earnest literary critics frownupon mysteries. Only recently an historian of thedetective genre put it down as "pre-eminently theliterature of the sick-room and the railway car-riage". But if art is any reflection of the preoccu-pations of society, then the persistent demand forcrime fiction in all media should make it an impor-tant variety of art.

In the television age, the literary critics havebeen joined by their counterparts who sit in judg-ment on TV in suggesting that the public really

ought to turn its mind to something better thancrime and mystery. They complain that far toomany tough cops and clever sleuths come and goon the screens in our homes. But it should be notedthat as fast as such shows go, new ones emerge,and old ones make a reappearance. Their attrac-tiveness must say something about the innerfeelings of their consumers, including an atavisticfascination with robbery and murder. Still, ifpeople are interested in crime for its own sake,they are also interested in punishment. They likethe thrills that go with deception and pursuit, butthey are not on the side of the criminal. Theywant to see justice triumph in the end.

This is where the fictional detective comes in-as an instrument of justice. He is the man (or, inrare cases, she is the woman) who overcomes allthe perplexing and occasionally dangerous obsta-cles to see to it that wrong-doers pay for theircrimes. Moreover, the detective achieves justicewhen it seems as if it will not be done throughordinary channels. If it were not for his skill anddiligence in penetrating to the heart of the mysterywhere less intelligent and intrepid people wouldhave failed, the culprit would have got off free.

The image of the detectiveas a modern knight errant

According to some historians, the detective’snon-fictional antecedents are considerably lessnoble. The original detective, they say, was at besta spy and at worst a stool-pigeon who operatedon the seamy fringes of the centralized policeforces of the cities of Europe in the mid-19th cen-tury. Detectives were regarded with suspicion andhostility by the public and looked down upon as anecessary evil by the police.

A more literary approach to the history of thedetective gives him a more aristocratic pedigree.Here he is seen as the successor to the knighterrant of old, that wandering figure who comesinto a situation at a moment of crisis, rights thewrongs, and then rides off in search of new wrongsto right. Could it be that our classic modern sleuth,

our Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer or Kojak, isreally a reincarnation of that man riding in pur-suit of a holy grail, that rescuer of endangeredmaidens? If so, does that account for the detective’spull on the imagination? Is there something deepwithin us that makes us want to believe in thereality of such a man, even though we are awarethat he exists only on paper or on a screen?

There can be no question about our psychologicalneed for heroes. A hero is someone bigger thanlife, and the detective certainly fills that bill. He issmarter and, in most instances, stronger than mostof us, and he has a keener sense of integrity. He isusually as much a protector of the weak andinnocent as a hunter of the guilty.

Softness and humanity in thechief of the homicide squad

Perhaps the most unusual of all detective heroes--and some think the greatest- is the above-mentioned Inspector Maigret. Maigret makes agood focal point for any discussion of the differ-ences and similarities among fictional detectives,and of why they are capable of living in our minds.

Maigret is the creation of an acknowledgedwriter of genius, Georges Simenon. Simenon haswritten more than 150 novels, the bulk of whichare not mystery or detective stories; Maigretfigures in only about one-third of the author’sworks. In his other novels, Simenon deals withthemes like sickness, old age, ignorance, suicideand madness.

It was into this nightmare world that, in 1930,Simenon introduced the serene and reassuringfigure of Inspector Maigret. Critics have seen twofaces to Simenon’s work: tragedy and wisdom.The wisdom shines forth in the Maigret stories,where the stark themes of tragedy, subjected to theuncompromising glare of Simenon’s artistry,come under the softening influence of Maigret’shumanity.

Softness and humanity are not words one wouldnormally associate with the chief of the homicidesquad in a great city. But the reader soon findsthat Maigret is closer to essential human concernsthan the other great sleuths. Their personalitiesand lifestyles set them apart from everyday lifeand ordinary peolSle. Most of them are bachelorswith a pretty insensitive approach to the oppositeSex. Almost all are eccentric in one way or another.They usually make a point of thumbing their nosesat convention.

Maigret, on the other hand, is one of us- aquiet, pipe-smoking, rather overweight fellow whowould make a good neighbour. He is no tough guyof the American pattern, forever punching out orshooting down his adversaries. On the contrary,he is touchingly vulnerable.

In Maigret’s eye, the questionis not ’whodunit", but why?

His thinking runs counter to that of the generalrun of fictional detectives. Mystery stories usuallyhinge on a puzzle that demands a solution; in theorthodox "whodunit", the overriding considerationis to unknot the puzzle and thereby solve thecrime. Maigret is not so much interested in whodid it as in why they did it. The killer’s identityis often revealed at least half-way through thestory. In one famous case, we are told in the title:Le Charretier de la Providence.

All of which might seem to lead to the conclusionthat Maigret is so different from the others as tobe in a class by himself. Actually, though, he isthe exception that proves the rule. For he is aboveall a public protector, as are all his confreres inthe realm of fictional crime detection. They allbring their wits, their instincts, and sometimestheir muscles to bear on the task of restoring thesocial certainties that have been upset by thecommission of a crime.

~In the complex and perilous world of the me-tropolis he acts as the defender of embattled

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innocence and the champion of the dominant socialmorality," literary historian Ian Ousby wrote ofthe fictional detective. Whether an upper classgent like The Saint or a rough diamond likeJ. D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, the detective’splace is on the side of the standards of honestyand decency to which the majority subscribe.

Seen in this light, our paper detectives reallyare modern knight errants. It is difficult to pictureAgatha Christie’s Miss Marple or G. K. Chester-ton’s Father Brown riding in on horseback to routvillains and vandals, but that is basically thetradition they followed every time they appliedmarvellous intellects to the question of who dis-turbed the social order by exterminating anotherhuman being.

We can only hope that heroeslike these really do exist

In addition to the fact that detective stories arefun and make excellent harmless tranquillizers,they would indeed seem to owe some of their en-during popularity to a human need for knighterrant images. Moral philosophers have said thatknight errants represent the conscience. Even DonQuixote tilting ridiculously at the windmills is anexpression of the latent nobility of man coming outto confront the dark forces that trouble the soul.

The question of why we should want to believein these mythical creatures to the extent of pre-tending they actually exist leads us back into thecomforting, tobacco-scented presence of InspectorMaigret. Maigret is good, strong, simple, wise, andunderstanding. Who would not want to believe ina man like that?

The same goes for all the other great detectives(take your pick) suspended in time as they strivein their own particular ways to accomplish justice.For without the possibility that people with thewill and skill to deliver us from evil walk theearth, where would we be? We can only hope thatsuch people exist not only on paper- that some-where there really are heroes fighting for thefreedom from molestation that is the basis ofeveryday civilized life.

©THE ROYAL BANK OF CANADA 1979/PRINTED IN CANADA