How The Detective Story Became The Crime Novel

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31161, 10 September 1966, Page 4

How The Detective Story Became The Crime Novel

(Reprinted from "The Times” Literary Supplement/

“What's the latest trend, boys, what’s the latest trend?” This neo-Empsonian question haunts all reviewers, but none more than those concerned with crime fiction. A test paper for them might include such questions as: (I) name three features distinguishing the Bond Age from the Deighton Era, (II) define the Police Novel, with examples, (III) comment on Dorothy Sayers’s observation that the detective story’ would turn into the novel of manners.

' The development of the ; spy story is certainly the jinost notable feature of the last 10 years in crime fic-i ition and it has indeed grown i with two heads, one sensa--1 tional and the other realistic. The James Bond books struck I notes of sexual wishfulfilraent, I snobbery’, and mechanical I violence which found almost I immediate response in the j post-Suez and post-Hungary generation—“ Casino Royale,” I the first Bond story, appeared 1 in 1953, but like the next two ; or three books sold slowly, j Yet if the Bond stories were j written to a formula which ’ Fleming became unable to escape, they w’ere marked also by a fine eye for places and . great expertise in dealing I with the technical details of j (say) underwater fishing. The ■ many recent sub-Bonds copy t the details of sex and violence to the verge of parody, but I they lack altogether the 1 romantic zest of the early

Bond books. Mr John Gardner’s Boysie Oakes, the cowardly liquidator who employs Soho thugs to carry out his murderous assignments, successfully parodies the Bond formula without losing ingenuity and excitement. Fleming would have enjoyed “The Liquidator.” “Realistic” may be the wrong word for the other strain in the spy story, although it describes well enough Mr John le Carre’s “The Spy Who Come in from the Cold” and its underrated successor “The Looking-Glass War.” It is rather that recent writers have seen in the spy’s relationships to his masters and his victims a means of expressing contemporary attitudes to life and society. Mr Len Deighton’s anti-hero of the Cold War, inarticulate about his beliefs but cockily assertive about his human dignity, exemplifies one use of the spy story, but the field has been invaded by several writers of high intelligence and literary skill. The most recent of them, Mr Anthony Firth in his elegantly written first novel, “Tall, Balding, Thirty-five,” leads his hero, John Limbo, through spying into homosexuality and coldblooded murder. Things were ordered differently in good Richard Hannay’s time. The past decade has seen also the rise of the novel concerned with the activities of the police as a whole rather than of one idealised policeman. Such novels offer a rea-

sonable simulacrum of police methods, and show the extent of police co-operation with laboratory, ballistics, and other scientific experts. Much the most successful of these books have been Mr Ed McBain’s American S7th Precinct series which, produced at the rate of two a year, maintain a high level of ingenuity and faithfulness. Mr J. J. Marric’s Gideon stories promised at one time to do something similar for this country, but the recent books have fallen off sadly.

Dorothy Sayers’s belief that the detective story of the 1920 s and 19305, and what she called its “artificial plotconstruction,” was played out and must give way to another kind of crime story has been proved true. There are no detective puzzles written now that match the masterpieces of the past. The form has shifted, however, not to the novel of manners she foresaw but to the novel of character. It is becoming increasingly difficult to say where the “novel” ends and the “crime novel” begins. The ambition of Miss Patricia Highsmith, for instance, is to write “a novel which has no murderer, no crime, no violent action ... it will be concerned with the people around a presumed murderer, and their attitudes, rather than with the murderer himself.” Mr Ross Macdonald, the heir to Raymond Chandler, says about “The, Far Side of the Dollar,” which received the 1965 Crime Writers’ Association award as the best book of the year, that it deals with “the uncertainty of identity which my work inherited from the difficult childhood which seems obligatory for writers of fiction.” The investigation of personality—attempt to reveal the springs of criminal action—is carried on both in America and in England by a score of talented writers, among whom Mr Macdonald’s wife Margaret Millar, John Bingham (whose “A Fragment of Fear.” published last year, was his best book since his first remarkable novel “My Name is Michael Sibley”) and Nicolas Freeling perhaps demand particular mention. Mr Freeling has recently expressed his resentment of the fact that his books are reviewed among detective stories and crude thrillers which they very little resemble, but probably most of these writers would be prepared to accept the label “crime novelist," in the sense that they are novelists and they write about crime. It would be wrong not to add that several masters, and more particularly mistresses, of the pre-war detective story continue to write and to please readers, although several of them have moved away from the classical detective story. The last books of Margery Allingham, who died this year, were noVels with a detective element, far removed from the work of her youth. She had recognised that the future is with the crime novelist, who realises that crime and spy stories are part of the entertainment industry, but within this limitation insists on paying the reader the compliment of taking him seriously.