AND THE CROOKED SHALL BE MADE STRAIGHT1

by James Lincoln Warren

I have noticed a tendency over the last several years for mystery short stories to be more commonly about the commission of crimes than their detection or solution. Now, there are some very good stories that follow this particular path. For example, both my colleagues Rob Lopresti’s and John M. Floyd’s Derringers were won by such stories2.

The first practitioner of the art I am aware of who specialized in such stories was Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law Ernest William Hornung, who gave us an inimitable series of short stories about a gentleman safe-cracker and burglar named A. J. Raffles. They are classics of crime fiction, of course, and gave rise to the entire caper genre.

In his memoirs, Doyle wrote of Hornung:

Willie Hornung, my brother-in-law, is another of my vivid memories. He was a Dr. Johnson without the learning but with a finer wit. No one could say a neater thing, and his writings, good as they are, never adequately represented the powers of the man, nor the quickness of his brain. These things depend upon the time and the fashion, and go flat in the telling, but I remember how, when I showed him the record of someone who claimed to have done 100 yards under ten seconds, he said: ‘It is a printer’s error.’ Golf he could not abide, for he said it was ‘unsportsman- like to hit a sitting ball’. His criticism upon my Sherlock Holmes was: ‘Though he might be more humble, there is no police like Holmes.’ I think I may claim that his famous character Raffles was a kind of inversion of Sherlock Holmes, Bunny playing Watson. He admits as much in his kindly dedication.3 I think, there are few finer examples of short-story writing in our language than these, though I confess they are rather dangerous in their suggestion. I told him so before he put pen to paper, and the result has, I fear, borne me out. You must not make the criminal a hero.

Some Raffles partisans have detected in the above an unflattering (to both Doyle and Hornung) patronizing touch, and Jeremy Lewis, the editor of The Collected Raffles, remarked that despite Doyle’s misgivings, “it seems improbable that Hornung’s enterprising anti-hero spawned a generation of gentlemanly imitators.”

True. But I think that Doyle had a point. Don’t stories that feature criminals as heroes romanticize the worst in human behavior? Disregarding the “gentlemanly” part, much of contemporary crime fiction regularly features ruthless assassins and psychotic serial killers as protagonists. Is that really want we want?

Edith Pargeter, better known under the nom de plume made famous by her Brother Cadfael stories, Ellis Peters, had this to say:

Apart from treating my characters with the same respect as in any other form of novel, I have one sacred rule about the thriller. It is, it ought to be, it must be, a morality. If it strays from the side of the angels, provokes total despair, willfully destroys—without pressing need in the plot—the innocent and the good, takes pleasure in evil, that is unforgivable sin. I use the word deliberately and gravely.

Call me old-fashioned, but I find myself much in sympathy with Miss Pargeter. I’ve written two stories where the murderers get away, “Black Spartacus” and “Jungle Music”, but in both of the stories the point was clearing the name of an innocent man wrongly accused. In every other story I’ve written that I can think of, Justice Is (Completely) Served. I like it better that way. After all, if one is going to bother to write a story about morality (and what else is crime fiction?), then there ought to be some sort of moral in it.

But the absence thereof is not what really bothers me about the relatively recent spate of committing-crime stories. What really bothers me is that, in most cases, they evince a certain laziness on the part of the authors. Frankly, I feel cheated as a reader. After all, it’s easier to plan and execute a crime than it is to solve one. Accordingly, it’s easier to write about committing a crime than about solving one. Committing a crime may require resolve, but bringing one to justice requires wit or character or both. That’s what makes ratiocinative fair-play mysteries so much fun to read. It’s also what burnishes Travis McGee’s and Philip Marlowe’s ever-so-slightly tarnished armor, and makes Harry Bosch such an entertaining implacable foe to evil-doers.

Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of crime-commission stories that are ingenious, particularly capers. How can you not love “Topkapi”? (Although our heroes don’t get away with it, of course.) The main feature of both Rob’s and John’s award-winning stories is a pungent irony, which obviously shows more than just a little wit and character. Bernie Rhodenbarr and John Archibald Dortmunder are just plain funnier than most “honest” men.

But I do like Holmes better than I like Raffles.

1. Isaiah 40:4 [↩]
2. “Nailbiter” by Lopresti, AHMM September 2003, and “Four for Dinner” by Floyd, in Seven by Seven, Wolfmont 2006. [↩]
3. The first collection of Raffles stories, The Amateur Cracksman, was published in 1899, and had the following dedication:

   TO
   A.D.C.
   THIS FORM OF FLATTERY

   [↩]