My Favorite Sleuths

"It is only in books that one finds the brilliant amateur detective X; real policemen are obstinate and hardheaded, are slow and literal-minded, are frequently mean and nearly always narrow: They have to be. They are part of the administrative machine, a tool of government control ..."

So reflects Van der Valk, Nicolas Freeling's Amsterdam inspector, on his way to try to stop a beautiful female aristocrat and ex--ski champion from ambushing a Dutch businessman with a hunting rifle on a lonely road in southern France. With this latest adventure, The King of the Rainy Country, Van der Valk confirms his status as one of the most promising arrivals on the post-War crime-fiction scene. In his account of real policemen he is actually a little hard on himself. Obstinate and slow he may be, but these are only rude names for the Netherlander's inbred conscientiousness. As for literal-minded, he is given to reflecting self-accusingly that he is too much of a northerner, with his veins full of Ibsen, and is able without difficulty to work out the motivation of a suicide by pondering over the poem of Baudelaire's alluded to in the title. Besides all this, he is intelligent, thoughtful and good-natured--the last of these by no means a standard characteristic of fictional sleuths. (Even Sherlock Holmes has been known to come back at Watson with a quick impatient snarl or so when the chase is really on.) Van der Valk is an impressive man interestingly rendered. His only shortcoming as a hero, the only thing that robs him of the almost mythical and mystical glamor of a Holmes or a Nero Wolfe, is that he, unlike them, is very much a real policeman.

The point is even clearer with Simenon's celebrated Inspector Maigret. In My Friend Maigret, the inspector takes along a Scotland Yard detective called Pyke to investigate a murder on a French island. Pyke--incidentally, an amusing and sympathetic portrayal--is supposed to be studying French police methods. At the end of the book it is suggested that Pyke, apart from having thrown down a good deal of the local wine, has been wasting his time, because there just are no such methods. None, that is, but the universal ones of interrogation of witnesses, suspects, neighbors and the like, thumbing through records and dossiers, consulting London, Ostend, Zurich and the like, and more interrogation. None of those brilliant intuitions, those miraculous leaps in the dark, those questions about what seem to be insanely irrelevant matters, that are so firmly in the middle of the great detective tradition inaugurated by Poe's Auguste Dupin. And Maigret himself, apart from taking an occasional applejack too many, has virtually no characteristics beyond those required to solve his cases. We know all too well that he will never in a million years start playing the violin or suddenly insist on cultivating orchids. That sort of thing is the prerogative of the unreal policeman, or rather the unreal nonpoliceman: Van der Valk's brilliant amateur detective X, who exists only in books. All the sleuths we remember and reverence and take into our private pantheon of heroes are figures not of realism but of fantasy, great talkers, great eccentrics, men who use inspiration instead of hard work, men to whom Venetian old masters mean more than police files and a good bottle of burgundy more than fingerprints. (Scope here for a scholarly footnote on the parallel with spy fiction: James Bond (continued on page 343)My Favorite Sleuths(continued from page 145) will still be around long after all the spies who came in from the cold, Ipcress-file-mongers and similar "real" secret agents have been forgotten.)

Halfway between the policeman and the amateur comes the private investigator, of whom Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe are typical, plus, in a rather different way, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. Theirs is a fantasy world all right, that of the toughie whose sacred objects are the gun, the boot, the bottle of rye and (less so in Chandler than in the others) the male organ. It has often been objected against the tough school that their values are lopsided or nonexistent, that in regard to ethics, and pretty well everything else, the police and the D.A.'s men are no better than the crooks or the Commies and the private eye is at least as bad as all the others. This loss of moral focusing is felt to be unedifying, even dangerous. Maybe. My own view is that the immoral or amoral hero of this type is bound to forfeit some of the reader's esteem and, along with it, some of his desire to identify with the hero. The story thus goes rather cold. In crime or spy fantasies the interest is partly a fairy-tale one, good versus bad in a rather basic way; James Bond would not mean so much to us if we were unable to feel that he was on the right side and that his cause was just. The toughies have no decent cause. Self-interest is all.

This would probably matter less than it does if these writers wrote better. Spillane is the best of the three cited--an unpopular view, which I would defend hotly. Legitimate shock and horror at the beastliness of Hammer's universe should not be allowed to weigh against the technical brilliance with which the whole thing is stage-managed. Few novelists on any level can match Spillane's skill in getting his essential facts across palatably and without interrupting the action, in knowing what to leave out; and the impression received that the narrative is just tumbling out of the corner of Hammer's mouth at 200 words a minute is a tribute to real professional competence. With all this granted, what makes the stories finally stultifying is Hammer's total facelessness, or mindlessness. He is a mere network of gristle connecting mouth, fist, trigger finger and penis. A hero needs more substance than that.

Sam Spade perhaps has a little more. The Maltese Falcon, in the period just after its publication (1930), was certainly taken as having opened up an undiscovered area in popular fiction. No doubt the removal of conventional ethics caught the taste of a public who, in mid-Depression, must have been more than ready to believe that almost any cynical view of the world was likely to approximate the way things really were, and did not care to notice the story's manifold improbabilities. Looking back now, it seems hard to understand what the fuss was about. Spade, the blond satan with the yellow-gray eyes, grinning wolfishly on every other page and making growling animal noises in his throat nearly as often, the most committed cigarette smoker before our friend 007, turns out to be faintly funny. Where Hammett presents Spade's toughness as real and probable, as the way things are did we but know it, the result is unbelievable; where the toughness is offered as exceptionally cool, exceptionally tough, it just seems corny. And both sorts come down much of the time to mere rudeness and bad temper. All of it is ladled out in low-budget-TV-show dialog. The gloss and the glow, if they were ever there, have been rubbed out by time.

Raymond Chandler was undoubtedly the most ambitious writer of the tough-thriller school, and for some time was, in England at any rate still is, a toast of the intellectuals. W. H. Auden went on record with the view that "Chandler's powerful books should be read and judged not as escape literature but as works of art." This advice strikes me as hazardous in the extreme. The books have undoubtedly worn less badly than Hammett's, having had for one thing less time to do so, since they belong roughly to the period 1939--1959. Philip Marlowe is an improvement on Spade. Some of Marlowe's toughness does boil down to meanness, unreticent dislike of the rich and indeed of most other groups and individuals, rudeness to servants and to women. On the other hand, there are some things he will not do, he will protect his clients under great pressure, he can show compunction and even sensitivity. What disfigures him is, again, the way he is presented by his creator. The tough catch phrases--don't kid me, son; quit stalling; on your way, brother--died with, or before, Bogart. There is also a moral pretentiousness whereby Marlowe is now and again made the vehicle for criticizing the sordid lives of Hollywood's denizens: the perverted producers, the writers drowning in bourbon and self-hatred, the chicks who will do absolutely anything to get a part--all that. Most of this comes ill from a private eye, even a comparatively honest one. Bits of stylistic pretentiousness underline the effect. The Big Sleep has bubbles rising in a glass of liquor "like false hopes" and, after an intermission of four words, a girl's breath being "as delicate as the eyes of a fawn." Is this our tough Chandler (let alone a work of art), or has some heart-throbbing female dream purveyor grabbed the pen?

Perry Mason provides a convenient stopover point. There would be a lot to be said for not noticing him at all, if it were not for the hideous frequency of his appearances in print and on television. I am afraid there can be very few people in our culture who would not know that, although Mason is not in the strict sense a detective, is a mere lawyer employing the Drake Detective Agency to do his legwork for him, he does investigate crimes, ending up ten times out of ten by winning one of those objection-overruled-objection-sustained rituals in concert with the D. A. and the judge. The TV films faithfully reflect the Erle Stanley Gardner novels in their portrayal of the inevitable three-stage progress from seeing-the-client through seeing-the-witnesses to going-to-court, with an expected unexpected revelation at the end. Mason has an impressive claim to being considered the most boring foe of criminality in our time, which is saying something if we make the effort to remember such cobwebbed figures as Inspector French (in the works of Freeman Wills Crofts) or Philo Vance (S. S. Van Dine). The nullity of Mason is nowhere better displayed than in his relations, or lack of any, with his assistant--I cannot bring myself to say girl Friday--Della Street. Della Street, whose name appears in full every time Gardner mentions her, answers the telephone and listens to Mason telling her that the law is not a rat-race unless you run with the rats. Oh, and sometimes she worries because Mason looks so tired. Nothing more; whereas the vital role of the assistant in detective fiction is to encourage and provoke the great man to reveal his hidden inner nature, as we shall see.

I hope we shall see much more than that. The sleuths put up to question so far have admittedly been treated in a rather carping or, as we British say, knocking spirit. My admiration is reserved for the detective who detects, whose claim to fame is his mind rather than his way with a girl or a jury. Heroes of this type show a strong family resemblance. Such a man will show some physical impressiveness, along the lines of Holmes' tall lean figure and piercing eyes, or Wolfe's vast poundage: 285 of them. If unimpressive, he will be spectacularly unimpressive, small and with an egg-shaped head like Poirot; small, round-faced and bespectacled like Father Brown. He is unmarried, or at least his wife is kept firmly off stage. A crucial point, this. Holmes hit the nail on the head for his group when he declared that he would never marry, lest he biased his judgment. But let Dr. Watson spell the point out:

All emotions, and that one [i.e., love] particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.... He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer.... For the trained observer to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results ...

(--A Scandal in Bohemia)

And no doubts must be thrown on any of those mental results. Quite right. But what are we to make of this avoidance of the fair sex, which in Wolfe's case rises, or sinks, to panic at the mere prospect of being alone with a woman? Could there be something a bit...you know...? Let us take a look at a famous incident in The Three Garridebs, wherein John Garrideb, alias Killer Evans, shoots Watson in the thigh. Holmes promptly disposes of Evans, and then...

...my friend's wiry arms were round me, and he was leading me to a chair.

"You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!"

It was worth a wound--it was worth many wounds--to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.

"It's nothing, Holmes. It's a mere scratch."

Is it without significance that, whereas the moment of revelation is dated by Watson in 1902, his account of it was held back from book publication until the more tolerant days of 25 years later? Answer: Yes. Utterly. Though it might be more fun to believe the opposite, Holmes is no fag. His lack of interest in women, made a positive characteristic to aid in the building up of his character, can be accounted for in at least two innocent ways. Just as the true Western fans in the moviehouse sigh and groan when Destry stops shooting and starts loving--and a large part of our feelings about Holmes are on this sort of level--so we should feel cheated and affronted if the great brain left Watson to get after the Man with the Twisted Lip for a spell and himself started taking Miss Violet de Merville off Baron Adelbert Gruner. Further, although Holmes would not have been difficult to turn into a lover, any adventure featuring him as such could not be a detective story but, as experience of other writers shows, some kind of thriller or pursuit story or psychological melodrama. The magnifying lens and the dozen red roses belong to different worlds.

Holmes is the memorable figure he is because Conan Doyle grasped the essential truth that the deductive solving of crimes cannot in itself throw much light on the character doing the solving, and therefore that that character must be loaded up with quirks, hobbies, eccentricities. It is always these irrelevant qualities that define the figure of the great detective, not his mere powers of reasoning. One thinks of Lord Peter Wimsey's collections of Sèvres vases and early editions of Dante (including the Aldine 8vo of 1502 and the Naples folio of 1477), Poirot's dandified clothes and tiny Russian cigarettes, Dupin's expertise about paving stones, grasses, astronomy, fungi and probably much more.

In Holmes' opinion, Dupin was "a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial." I agree. Apart from his irritating mannerisms, all three of Dupin's cases are very shaky. He could never have got ahead of the police in The Murders in the Rue Morgue without their incredible ignorance; his deductions in The Mystery of Marie Rogêt are at least highly dubious at several key points; and in The Purloined Letter he not only again had stupid police to help him out but also a dementedly foolhardy criminal. However, something deeper than professional contempt or jealousy was at work to give Holmes so jaundiced a view of his--rightly or wrongly--famous French predecessor. Holmes was quite intelligent enough to see that Dupin was his predecessor in much more than just the chronological sense.

There are plenty of comparatively minor resemblances between the two detectives: the pipe smoking, the love of long pedantic monologs (plus, in each case, the presence of a devoted associate who knows just what to break in with or at least stays awake), the hatred of company and intrusions on privacy. Holmes, we are told, "loathed every form of society with his whole bohemian soul"; Dupin went so far as to solve the Rogêt case without leaving his armchair, recalling to us a more recent and much fatter detective who makes a point of operating in the same way. More important among Dupin-Holmes resemblances is the possession of vast and variegated learning. Holmes improves on Dupin's astronomy and mycology to the extent of being able to hold forth, in the course of one dinner, about miracle plays, medieval pottery, Stradivarius violins and the Buddhism of Ceylon. As regards the modern world he is frighteningly well informed. It seems that he has always card-indexed the whole of each day's press, "docketing all paragraphs concerning men and things," a testing task unassisted even for Holmes, "so that it was difficult to name a subject or a person on which he could not at once furnish information." Obviously. An occasionable pebble from this vast mountain of lore is of course immediately applicable to the case in hand. Just as stuff about grasses and fungi helped Dupin with Marie Rogêt, so Holmes would benefit from the research that went into that unforgettable monograph on the varieties of tobacco ash. But the real point of all this knowledge is much less what you do with it than the simple and memorable fact that you have it.

Knock Dupin as one may, his final and vital legacy to Holmes was what created the detective story as we have known it. However suspect Dupin's chains of inference may be at any particular link, what we are witnessing overall is a convinced demonstration of the power of the human mind to observe and to reason. This is what Holmes is constantly up to. He may, as the story unfolds, deny the reader vital clues and information--or Watson will do it for him, giving him the opportunity, in one of the two stories he narrates himself, to sneer at Watson's habit of contriving "meretricious finales" by the use of this kind of suppression. A bit hard on poor Watson, this, considering he could only put in as much as Holmes would tell him. Anyway: Holmes may also irk us, or give us the wrong kind of laugh, by overdoing the demonstration, as when he discovers everything that happened at the scene of a fairly complicated crime by working on the footmarks with his lens, or by deducing 17 separate facts, 11 of them nonphysical, about a man by examining his hat, one of the 11 being that his wife has ceased to love him. (Not all that difficult when you know how: The hat had not been brushed for a long time, and its age would have shown the man was too poor to afford a servant.) But many of the imaginative leaps are valid and thrilling: for instance, the moment when Holmes decides why an elderly pawnbroker has been induced to join a league of red-haired men after a glance at the trouser legs of the old boy's assistant. "Holmes, this is marvelous!" Watson is supposed to cry when this sort of thing happens, though my recollection is that he never quite does. But he would have been right. It is marvelous.

The deductive prodigies are strongly supported by Doyle's gifts for suspense, horror and action writing, all carried forward on an unfailing flow of ingenious ideas. Holmes founded a dynasty. One of its more unexpected recent members is the Martian detective Syalok, a birdlike creature who wears a tirstokr hat, smokes a pipe in which the tobacco is cut with permanganate of potash, and in Poul Anderson's story The Martian Crown Jewels recovers the theft of these diadems by a strict application of Holmesian principles--rather stricter, in fact, than the master often used himself. But Holmes has, in one sense, been even further afield than Mars. His exploits have been the subject of fierce controversy in Russia. I am indebted to G. F. McCleary for the information that some years ago the stories were issued there on a large scale, and that the librarians of the Red Army recommended Holmes to the troops as "the exterminator of crimes and evils, a model of magnificent strength of thought and great culture." This, McCleary continues, went down badly with a writer in the newspaper Vechernaya Moskva, who thought the tales offended socialist ideology by "poisoning the minds of readers with false morals concerning the strength of the foundations of private property, and diverting attention from the social contradictions of capitalist reality." Even Holmes himself might not have been able to deduce that much from the facts.

With few but shining exceptions, the heirs of Sherlock Holmes are an undistinguished lot. Lord Peter Wimsey has never quite survived, in my mind at least, the initial impression given by his righty-ho, dear-old-thing, don't-you-know, chin-chin style of dialog and his mauve dressing gown, primrose silk pajamas, monocle and the rest of the outfit. Here I should in fairness make it plain that Wimsey is no more of a fag than Holmes is: He merely looks and sounds like one, as a certain kind of English aristocrat does to virtually all American, and the vast majority of British, eyes and ears. As for Wimsey, one might also plead that the bally-fool persona is, at least in part, put on to fool criminals. But what lies beneath the mask, if it is a mask, is hardly more attractive and certainly less vivid. Lord Peter is just an old connoisseur and clubman who gets asked along to help out upper-crust families or trips over a stray corpse. In his later career the deductive faculty in him ran thin and he would fall back more on luck. He certainly got it, having once happened, for example, to have deposited a bag at a luggage counter where another bag that happened to be the twin of the first one happened also to have been deposited. The second bag happened to have somebody's head in it. In other adventures he got tied up with a ghastly female egghead, thus establishing to some extent his heterosexual bona fides, but at the same time forgetting about crime and talking to the female egghead instead, clear evidence for my rule that love and detection do not mix. Even in his heyday he often seemed to differ from the other people in the story by being merely slow on the uptake while they were moronic or crazed.

Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Ellery Queen, Inspector--later Assistant Commissioner Sir John--Appleby deserve, or at any rate will get, shorter shrift from me. I have never understood the fame of the two Agatha Christie characters, both of whom seem straight out of stock--Poirot the excitable but shrewd little foreigner, Marple the innocent, helpless-looking old lady with the keen blue eyes. And although some of the early Christies (Why Didn't They Ask Evans? for instance) had splendidly ingenious plots, the later Poirots and Marples have become thinned down, not surprising in a writer who has been hard at work for 45 years. Queen, who has been around just since 1929, has had his ingenuities, too, but he is too slight a figure to sustain more than a tiny corner of Holmes' mantle, acting mostly as a sounding board for the other characters, a camera for the story, and a mouthpiece when the author wants to chat things over with the reader. Ellery of the silvercolored eyes is seldom much more than an extension of the plot.

To label as a similar plot device so distinguished a personage as Michael Innes' Appleby may look a little rough, but here I am doing it, and if Appleby could know, he would do no more than shrug his well-tailored shoulders, murmur a quotation from Donne or Hardy and perhaps reach for another modest measure of that liqueur brandy of his that surpasses anything in the Duke of Horton's cellar. Appleby has become an establishment figure, moving in a world that would be anathema to Holmes' bohemian soul. The Appleby method of detection is to sit back and wait for the unconscious to come up with a solution, though the sitting back is purely mental: There can be plenty of physical rushing about in pursuit of stolen masterpieces, errant scientists with lethal secrets and such. Appleby is mostly the man to whom it all happens; most of it could happen to anybody, or nobody. The opposite is true of the novels of Edmund Crispin, who yet owes something to Innes. Crispin's detective, Gervase Fen, is an Oxford don, an eccentric after the fashion of Holmes or Wimsey, but funnier and in one sense grander than they, in that he seems to create his own kind of adventure. Nobody but Fen could find himself in a room whose occupant had unconsciously re-created the setting of Poe's The Raven, or in a situation to which the only clue depends on an intimate knowledge of Edward Lear's limericks. There is ingenuity here, too, including a nonelectronic method of eavesdropping on a conversation out of earshot of the eavesdropper.

So far I have tried to anatomize six American and five British detectives, plus a few doubtful cases emanating from the general northwestern-European area. This seems fair treatment of an Anglo-American literary form that has always had connections with France and thereabouts. Despite these connections, which go back at least as far as 1828, when the real-life detective François Eugène Vidocq began publishing his famous Mémoires, the detective story has flourished typically in the English language. A. E. Murch suggests in his detailed and fascinating work, The Development of the Detective Novel, that the law in France among other places is set up in such a way that the public tends to regard the police with some fear and suspicion, at any rate without the instinctive feelings of support common to Americans and British, who thus find it easy and natural to sympathize with a hero working on the side of the police. Possibly. But then all kinds of genre writing, offshoots from the main stem of literature, are largely confined to English: not just the Western novel, but science fiction, the ghost story, to some extent the cloak-and-dagger thriller. Something vague and basic to do with the language? Decide for yourself.

The three great successors of Sherlock Holmes are G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and John Dickson Carr's Doctor Fell. The first is British, the second American, the third British again but written about by an American, and so neatly preserving the balance.

Father Brown is not an eccentric in the superficial, violin-playing or orchid-rearing sense. But he is extraordinary enough, more so today than when Chesterton was writing, for Brown's extraordinariness is founded in his religion. Whether we like it or not, the little man's devotion, total courage, human insight and unshakable belief in reason are at any rate statistically uncommon. Some readers have found too much Roman Catholic propaganda in the stories. I feel that the Christian element, which is sometimes built into the plot, is never narrowly sectarian, and that part of it which overlaps with the advocacy of sheer common sense ought to be acceptable to everybody. It would be truer to say that what propaganda there is gets directed against atheism, complacent rationalism, occultism and superstition, all those shabby growths which the decline of Christian belief has fostered, and many, though perhaps not most, readers will sympathize here, too. My only real complaint is that this bias sometimes reveals the villain too early. We know at once that the prophet of a new sun cult is up to no good, and are not surprised that it is he who allows a blind girl to step to her death in an empty elevator shaft.

Like Gervase Fen, though on a more serious level, Brown is made for the situations he encounters and they for him. They embody his love of paradox and of turning things back to front, his gift for seeing what is too obvious for everyone else to notice, his eye for the mentally invisible man. Only Brown could have wandered into a house where the recently dead owner's diamonds lay in full view minus their settings, heaps of snuff were piled on shelves, candles littered the tables, and the name of God had been carefully cut out of the family Bible every single time it occurred. And when the owner is dug up and found to be minus his head, only Brown could have taken this as natural and inevitable, the final clue showing that no crime had been committed after all. (You will have to read "The Honor of Israel Gow" in The Innocence of Father Brown to find the answer.)

Rather too often, Brown runs into impersonations, twin brothers, secret passages, unlikely methods of murder: It would take a lot of good luck to succeed first try in dropping a noose round someone's neck from a dozen feet above him, and again to hit your man on the head with a hammer thrown from a church tower. But the good ideas are many and marvelous. The howling dog that gave away a murderer, the trail to an archcrook that began with somebody (guess who) swapping the contents of the sugar and salt containers in a restaurant, the man who seemed to have got into a garden without using the only entrance and the other man who got out of the same garden partly, but not completely--these are pretty standard occurrences in Father Brown's world. That world is vividly atmospheric, thanks to Chesterton's wonderful gift for depicting the effects of light on landscape, so that the stories glow as well as tease and mystify. They are works of art.

It is a goodish step from here to the old brownstone on West 35th Street where Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin chew the fat, eat their heads off, infuriate Inspector Cramer and incidentally catch crooks. The weakness of Stout's hugely readable stories is always the story. The idea of splitting the conventional detective into two--Wolfe to do the thinking, Archie the legwork--cuts both ways. It gives great scope for rounding out Wolfe's character, but it inevitably diminishes Archie in proportion. I find Archie faintly unsympathetic anyhow, a bit too effortlessly attractive to women, a bit too free with his fists, a bit too reminiscent of Sam Spade. Certainly, when he goes ferreting for Wolfe at Cramer's headquarters, or Lon Cohen's Gazette office, or wherever the crime may have taken place, the interest slackens. We want to be back with Wolfe. I can seldom be bothered with the details of the investigation, which usually proceeds by revelation and discovery rather than by actual deduction. What counts for most readers, I am sure, is the snappy dialog, Archie's equally snappy narrative style, his relations with Wolfe (he is always sympathetic here), and finally, massively, triumphantly, Wolfe himself.

Wolfe gets about as far as a human being can, much further than Sherlock Holmes, in his suspicion, fear, almost hatred of humanity. We all have such moods, and Wolfe is there to reassure us that these feelings are quite proper for an intelligent, learned, humane and humorous man. This is perhaps the secret of his attraction, for attractive he abundantly is. Along with this goes a marked formidable quality, such that one would, on meeting Wolfe in the flesh, feel grateful for his approval and daunted by his contempt. All really great detectives inspire this reaction, perhaps by acting as some version of a father figure. Brown does it to us, Dr. Fell does; even, granted the shift in general outlook since late-Victorian times, Holmes does. Any kind of real policeman does not, and anybody Mike Hammer took a liking to ought to feel a twinge of alarm.

Another part of Wolfe's appeal is his addiction to views and attitudes that seem both outdated and sensible, reactionary and right, the sort of thing you and I ought to think and feel, and probably would if we had Wolfe's leisure and obstinacy. Who has not wanted to insist on never going out, living to an unshakable routine, distrusting all machines more complicated than a wheelbarrow and having to be heavily pressured each time before getting into a car, allowing hardly anybody to use one's first name, keeping television out and reading all the time, reacting so little in conversation that an eighth-of-an-inch shake of the head becomes a frenzy of negation, using an inflexible formal courtesy such that proven murderers are still referred to as "Mr." and an 18th Century style of speech that throws off stuff like "Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear" and "Madam, I am neither a thaumaturge nor a dunce"? Wolfe is every man's Tory, a contemporary Dr. Johnson. The original Dr. Johnson was a moralist before everything else, and so atheart is Wolfe. This, I suppose, makes him even more of an antique.

Lastly, Dr. Gideon Fell. I must explain at once that, when writing under his pseudonym of Carter Dickson, John Dickson Carr uses a detective called Sir Henry Merrivale, or H. M., who according to me is an old bore. His adventures, however, are as fascinating as any of Fell's, and I should not want to put anybody off masterpieces like The White Priory Murders, The Reader Is Warned and The Ten Teacups. They are, of course, as are the best Carr novels, minor masterpieces. Perhaps no detective story can attain the pitch of literary excellence. Perhaps it can only offer ingenuity raised to the point of genius. In Carr-cum-Dickson it does, perhaps two dozen times in all, and this author is a first-rate artist. A neglected one, naturally, and likely to remain so while detective fiction remains undervalued, while most of those who should know better remain ignorant of the heights of craftsmanship and virtuosity it can reach. I will offer a small prize to any such person who can read the first chapter of Carr's The Burning Court and not in honesty have to go on. Neither Fell nor H. M. nor any great detective features here, only an adequate one. The book is a tour-de-force blending of detection and witchcraft: both ingredients genuine.

To return at length to Dr. Fell--it would have been useful in one way to come to him straight after Father Brown. The character of Fell has little to do with that of Brown, but a great deal, especially physically, with Chesterton himself. The huge girth, the bandit's mustache, the box-pleated cape and shovel hat, the enthusiasm for English pubs, beer and roast beef, all these are taken straight from that brilliant but so often unsatisfactory English writer who died 30 years ago. And more than this. Fell's world is that of Brown made more probable, the wilder flights of fancy brought under control, the holes in the plot conscientiously plastered over and made good. Like Brown, Fell constantly encounters the impossible murder, but Fell shows its possibility more convincingly. Most often, almost always, the victim is discovered in a locked room, last seen in good health, exits and entrances secured or watched or even guarded by responsible and provenly innocent outsiders. Carr boasts that he has devised over 80 different solutions to the locked-room puzzle, and in one of the novels Fell, a monologist with the best of them, delivers a fascinating lecture on the subject. This is The Three Coffins, to quote the inexcusable American retitling of the British edition The Hollow Man, which perfectly suggests the macabre menace of the story. That man must indeed have been hollow who, watched of course by a responsible and innocent witness, was seen to enter a room without other access in which, later, there is found the corpse of the room's occupant, but of course no hollow man. This is Chestertonian, or Brownian, though its explanation has a Carrian validity; and another novel, The Crooked Hinge, takes as the epigraph of its final section a quotation from a Father Brown story that begins: "There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of disguise, could not cover, and that was his singular height." Fell is dealing with a chap who could have taught Flambeau a trick or two, and for once the chap gets away. Ingenuity deserves a prize now and again.

The light in Gideon Fell's study is burning low. He still works desultorily at his great chronicle of The Drinking Customs of England from the Earliest Days, still gives great rumbling sniffs and plies his red bandanna handkerchief. But without conviction. He makes rare and comparatively ineffectual public appearances now. His heyday came to an end somewhere about 1950, and there died with it the classical detective story, in which all the clues were scrupulously put before the reader, the kind of writing of which Fell's creator has been the greatest exponent.

Elsewhere the picture is the same. Recruitment to the ranks of potential great detectives has fallen to nothing. Real policemen are all the rage. Fell always got on well with them, had no hesitation about saving himself trouble by using their findings, but though they were smart and often nearly right, he was smarter and always right. He would view the activities of contemporary real policemen like Van der Valk with tolerance, even appreciation, but he would have little time for the character who has usurped his place in the sun: the secret agent, the international spy. I can hear him muttering under his bandit's mustache about the sad substitution of brawn for brain as the up-to-date hero's essential characteristic, of action for thought and glamor for decency. I would only go part of the way with him there. But I can sympathize.