THE ART OF THE DETECTIVE STORY

by Steve Steinbock

Two weeks back I spent a lot of column space telling you very little about R. Austin Freeman and his 1923 essay, “The Art of the Detective Story.” Today I’ll tell you a little bit more. But first, reading Freeman put me in an interesting verbialogical frame of mind. (I’m not certain “verbialogical” is a real word. Maybe what I mean is philological. I’m relying on our resident old PHART to set me straight.

In his essay, Dr. Freeman used the word appertain, in the context of “qualities appertaining to good fiction.” At first glance, I wondered if this was another irregardlessism, i.e. a word fattened up with unnecessary and/or redundant affixings, I was wrong. Appertain is a perfectly good word, and it’s not, as I had suspected, a highfalutin synonym of pertain. (“Appertain” means to be a part or attribute of something, while “pertain” means to be in relation to something).

In truth, the word irregardless doesn’t annoy me as much as some other words. It’s been around for almost a hundred years, and despite the facts that it doesn’t mean anything and is a gaudy imposter for the word, regardless, I tend to overlook it.

Do you remember being in fourth grade (or was it fifth) and your teacher presented the bonus spelling word antidisestablishmentarianism? I’ve always found it much easier to spell that to pronounce. It’s a very real word, but I’ve never EVER heard it used except in the context of long spelling words. My understanding is that back in the previous century or so, certain Protestant denominations had been established. But in 1871, the Church of Ireland was disestablished (i.e. declared to no longer be the official religion), and in 1920, the Church of England was disestablished in parts of Wales. In both cases, there must have been people who were opposed to disestablishment, and were thus antidisestablishment. That made them antidisestablishmentarians and their movement was Antidisestablishmentarianism. Follow all that? Good. At least one of us is. I need a compass to get my way through that.

Which brings me to another word, one that is accepted, but one that gives me the heeby-jeebies: Orientate. The verb orient, originally meaning to turn to the east, is a perfectly good word for the action of adjusting a compass, or any act of adjusting to a particular direction. Orientation is a perfectly good noun to describe the state of being adjusted or turned. So why on earth do people feel compelled to verb a noun when there’s already a perfectly good verb already there. Oops, I just did it myself. I used verb as a verb.

On to Freeman.

I should say that as much as I admire Freeman, I doubt he’d have much tolerance for me. He was not a fan of people of my religious persuasion – he would have called it my race – and often cast Jews as villains in his stories. I read somewhere, although it may have been apocryphal, that from time to time people would assume that Freeman was Jewish based on his surname, to which he would fly into a rage. But Freeman’s religious and ethnic prejudices are the subject of another day.

The subject for today is his set of literary prejudices, and his attitude toward the literary prejudices of others.

In Freeman’s essay, after pointing out the unfortunate bias against detective fiction, and admitting that much of what passed as detective fiction truly was bad stuff, goes on to explain what good detective fiction should be. I admit that Freeman was a bit of a snob about detective fiction. He said that there’s only a select part of the population that can really appreciate detective stories for what they are. The true devotee, Freeman wrote, “are to be found among men of the definitely intellectual class: theologians, scholars, lawyers, and to a less extent, perhaps, doctors and men of science,” and that “the enthusiast par excellence is the clergyman of a studious and scholarly habit.”

Freeman asserted that good detective fiction must have the qualities of good fiction in general. The qualities he listed (and this is where he used the word “appertaining”) are “grace of diction,” “humour,” “interesting characterization,” “picturesqueness of setting,” and “emotional presentation.”

This past month we’ve had a number of columns from our various regular contributors that explored structures and elements of fiction. For the detective story, Freeman listed four:

1. Statement of the problem;
2. Production of the data for its solution (clues);
3. The discovery, i.e. the completion of the inquiry by the investigator and his declaration of the solution; and
4. The proof, a unique characteristic of classical detective stories wherein the investigator provides an explanation of the evidence and solution.

I don’t know too many writers who use such a classical structure anymore. Even modern authors who follow the rules of “fair play” (i.e. providing the reader with all the evidence needed to solve the mystery) seldom include that fourth step – the exposition.

That is something else I’ll have to explore in some future Bandersnatch. Until then, as always, I’m very truly yours,

Steve