In its recognizable form, however, the detective story began in the 1840s with the erudite, eccentric dilettante sleuths created by Edgar Allan Poe, followed several decades later by Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes. Since then, we have known the gentle and unassuming, the strange and the Belgian, the hard-boiled Continental Op and the sternly chivalrous knight lost in the forest of error, sin, and symbols.
There have been derivative works by the thousand and innovative ones by the dozen. There have been detective novels where there is no crime but everyone is guilty, such as Kafka's "The Trial" (1925), and there has been at least one -- Georges Perec's 1969 novel "La disparition" (finally translated by Gilbert Adair in 1994 as "A Void") -- in which suspicion falls not on a person but on the letter "e," which does not make a single appearance in the novel's more than 300 pages.
The Italian writer Italo Calvino, working in the 1970s with a circle of experimentalist French writers and mathematicians called OuLiPo (Perec was a fellow member), attempted to develop a detective story matrix that would produce 3 billion scenarios through the combination of four persons and 12 criminal acts. The Oulipoians' bag of highly theoretical literary tricks included one in which the assassin would turn out to be not the narrator -- a ruse that caused a paperstorm in 1926 when Agatha Christie used it in "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" -- but the reader.
. . .
The particular tradition of the armchair detective was born some 160 years ago, when Poe dreamed up C. Auguste Dupin, who discovers that the brutal and seemingly unsolvable murders that took place in the ominously named Rue Morgue were committed by a passionate, disoriented orangutan. The amateur detective possesses some clear advantages: for example, a capacity for attending to strange details and responding to them with strange ideas -- illustrated magnificently by Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, with his lightning deductions and his deep body of natural and unnatural knowledge (we need only think of his monograph on all known types of ash).
It has long been remarked that philology has much in common with criminal detection. But the natural affinity between the bookish academic and the worldly detective came into full flower when the American writer Jacques Futrelle's "Thinking Machine" -- otherwise known as Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., M.D.S. -- made his novelistic debut in 1906 with "The Chase of the Golden Plate." (This month, the Modern Library will publish a collection of Futrelle's "Thinking Machine" short stories.)
The Thinking Machine was a master of all known sciences, had a brain so large he wore a size 8 hat, and once held a professorial chair at "Hale University" in New England. Though not particularly reverent toward the academy (at one point, he uses honorary degrees for kindling), Van Dusen thought and acted like a scholar. He starred in some 50 stories until Futrelle tired of the character and turned to writing Edwardian romances with titles like "My Lady's Garter" before meeting his end on the Titanic. Thus closed the first chapter in the history of the academic murder mystery.
. . .
Since then, it is not simply academics who have followed murders -- murders have also come to the academics. The 1930s brought a wave of detective novels set in prestigious British academic institutions such as Oxford or Cambridge, known as "don's delights." In Dorothy L. Sayers's "Gaudy Night" (1935), the proudest member of the genre, mystery writer Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion ("gaudy") only to find herself collaborating with detective and suitor Lord Peter Wimsey in heading off a potential murderess outraged by the very existence of manless female scholars. J.C. Masterman's "An Oxford Tragedy" (1933), written by a lecturer in history at Christ Church College who later became a British counterintelligence mastermind, calls in a Viennese lawyer with more than usual acuity to restore peace to Oxford. More than 50 years later, Iain Pears's brilliant "An Instance of the Fingerpost" (1998) returns to Oxford -- but this time it's the 1660s, and the murder of an Oxford don is told from the point of view of four different narrators, only one of them reliable.
America's universities have had their own brushes with crime novels -- especially universities in these parts. Amanda Cross's 1981 book "Death in a Tenured Position" unfolds around the gender trouble caused by the first tenured female professor in Harvard's English department. Alfred Alcorn's "Murder in the Museum of Man" (1997) takes place in a fictional museum modeled on Harvard's Museum of Natural History. The 1998 novel "The Student Body," by four Harvard grads writing under the collective pseudonym "Jane Harvard," concerns a student prostitution ring in Cambridge. And in this summer's smash bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" (Doubleday), author Dan Brown sends a Harvard professor of "religious symbology" on a sort of sabbatical at the American University of Paris, where he finds himself thrown into a maelstrom involving Opus Dei, Leonardo, Botticelli, Newton, and Franois Mitterand -- and the Holy Grail.
And then there's Matthew Pearl's recent bestseller "The Dante Club" (Random House), which may be the most successful murder mystery ever set on Brattle Street. Pearl takes for his detectives the cream of the Boston Brahmin crop: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Fama volat (fame is fleeting) might serve as the book's motto. The reputations of the three friends have not weathered the last 150 years very well. For many readers, the conservative regularity of their thought, verse, and beards has made of Longfellow and Lowell mere stereotypes of 19th-century American literary life, and Holmes is often confused with his more famous son.
Fama volat might serve as "The Dante Club"'s motto for another reason: It is Latin. The backdrop of the book is a struggle between the Latin verse of Virgil and "modern" literature, exemplified by Dante and his use of the Italian vernacular. By the 18th century, Dante's reputation had sunk to a striking low: The English writer Horace Walpole branded him "extravagant, absurd, disgusting, in short, a Methodist parson in Bedlam," while Voltaire remarked that "his reputation will go on increasing, because scarce anybody reads him."
But in Pearl's 19th-century Cambridge, Longfellow and his friends want to change that, while the Harvard board of trustees, admiring the classics and disdainful of modern, vulgar languages, wants to prevent it. And then there are murders -- not poised and heroic Virgilian murders but gruesome and gory Dantean murders. Sin is found to be no more rare in cultivated Cambridge than feuding Florence, and local worthy after local worthy is punished with a darkly appropriate death.
As Pearl recognizes, the library can be an excellent setting for a detective novel. The tradition of bookish murdering goes back to the dangerous hush of such novels as Charles J. Dutton's "Murder in a Library" (1931), Marion Boyd's "Murder in the Stacks" (1934), and Agatha Christie's "The Body in the Library" (1942). The weapons are various, from the brass catalog drawer spindle used in both Lawrence Blochman's "Death Walks in Marble Halls" (1951) and Jo Dereske's "Miss Zukas and the Library Murders" (1994) to the calfskin-bound volume of Horsley's "Britannia Romana" used to brain a cataloger in Hazel Holt's 1991 novel "The Cruelest Month."
Sometimes the plot centers around efforts to prevent people from reading certain dangerous books. Umberto Eco's 1980 masterpiece of medieval library intrigue, "The Name of the Rose," pits a British monk with the Holmesian name of William of Baskerville against a doctrinaire monk who resorts to murder in order to prevent others from being tempted by heretical texts. In "The Gutenberg Murders" (1931), coauthors Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning describe a particularly dangerous 100-year-old French philosophy treatise that includes a recipe for mortally burning victims by painting their clothes with phosphorous.
Dante saved his punishments for the dead. The murderous Dante reader in Matthew Pearl's novel does not show this delicacy and begins trying the great Italian's recipes for pain upon the living. It's up to Dante's more high-minded readers to save Cambridge from this literature-inspired terror.
. . .
In 1945, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, who liked Dante but not detective fiction, published a famous essay in the New Yorker titled "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" Detective stories, Wilson complained, "are able to profit by an unfair advantage in the code which forbids the reviewer to give away the secret to the public -- a custom which results in the concealment of the pointlessness of a good deal of this fiction and affords a protection to the authors which no other department of writing enjoys."
Wilson, enemy of the detective novel, tells us that it is not art. W.H. Auden, passionate friend of the detective novel, tells us the same. Raymond Chandler tells us that detective novels can be art, but this does not count because he means his own. What are we then to think while we read detective novels? That we should be reading something else, something more serious and edifying -- Dante, perhaps?
Other cultures have their own suspicions of the genre. The Germans call detective novels schmoker because of the intensity and rapidity with which we burn through them. In Dante's language they are called gialli -- "yellows" -- because of the easily yellowed paper on which they used to be printed. (I asked an Italian scholar whether this was also because they might incite fear and was told that "Italians are not scared of books.") Detective novels are produced as cheaply as possible because, unlike Dante's writing, they are not meant to stand time's test but to yellow and burn and pass away without a trace.
So why our enduring fascination with them? No better answer can be found than the one given by another fearless Italian, Umberto Eco. In an essay about writing "The Name of the Rose," he refers to what he calls "detective novel metaphysics." He suggests that what so fascinates us is not the violent urges such stories might allow us to vent, nor the reassurance of seeing the social, legal, and moral order restored at the end. Instead, Eco writes, we are fascinated by "conjecture in its pure state." To solve the mystery, one must assume that all elements are connected -- one must be, like the detective, awake to every possibility, taking nothing for granted and constantly exercising our faculties of conjecture so as to imagine how and why things might have happened, and whether they might have happened differently.
This activity may not always deserve the crown of art, or the gown of academe. But if such mental exercise is what remains when the paper yellows and burns, then the time spent with a detective novel is time well spent indeed.
Leland de la Durantaye is an assistant professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
