Better written, conceived with greater moderation, and clinging more closely to human probabilities, are John Rhode’s novels dealing with Dr. Priestley’s adventures — Dr. Priestley’s Quest, The Paddington Mystery, and The Ellerby Case. Dr. — or, as he is generally referred to in Mr. Rhode’s text, Professor — Priestley has many characteristics in common with Dr. Thorndyke. He is a schoolman, fairly well along in years, without a sense of humor, and inclined to dryness; but he is more of the intellectual scientist, or scientific thinker, than Dr. Freeman’s hero. (“Priestley, cursed with a restless brain and an almost immoral passion for the highest branches of mathematics, occupied himself in skirmishing round the portals of the universities, occasionally flinging a bomb in the shape of a highly controversial thesis in some ultra-scientific journal”). His detective cases to date have been few, and he suffers by comparison with the superior Dr. Thorndyke.
VII
The purely intellectual detective — the professor with numerous scholastic degrees, who depends on scientific reasoning and rarefied logic for the answer to his problems — has become a popular figure in the fiction of crime detection. His most extravagant personification — what might almost be termed the reductio ad absurdum of this type of super-sleuth — is to be found in Jacques Futrelle’s Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, PH.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., etc. The first book to recount the criminal mysteries that came under Professor Van Dusen’s observation was The Thinking Machine, later republished as The Problem of Cell 13; and this was followed by another volume of stories entitled The Thinking Machine on the Case. These tales, despite their improbability — and often impossibility — nevertheless constitute attractive diversion of the lighter sort.
G.K.Chesterton’s Father Brown — a quiet, plain little priest who is now definitely established as one of the great probers of mysteries in modern detective fiction — is also what might be called an intellectual sleuth, although the subtleties of his analyses depend, in large measure, on a kind of spiritual intuition — the result of his deep knowledge of human frailties. Although Father Brown does not spurn material clues as aids to his conclusions, he depends far more on his analyses of the human heart and his wide experience with sin. At times he is obscure and symbolic, even mystical; and too often the problems which Mr. Chesterton poses for him are based on crimes that are metaphysical and unconvincing in their implications; but Father Brown’s conversational gifts — his commentaries, parables and observations — are adequate compensation for the reader’s dubiety. The fact that Father Brown is concerned with the moral, or religious, aspect, rather than the legal status, of the criminals he runs to earth, gives Mr. Chesterton’s stories an interesting distinction.
Similar in methods, but quite different in results, are the excellent stories by H.C.Bailey setting forth the cases of Dr. Reginald Fortune. Dr. Fortune is an adjunct of Scotland Yard, a friend and constant companion of Stanley Lomas who is a chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. Like Father Brown, Dr. Fortune is highly intuitional; and his final results depend on logic and his knowledge of men rather than on the evidential and circumstantial indications of the average official police investigation. And like Father Brown he has a gift for conversation and repartee that makes even the most sordid and unconvincing of his cases interesting, if not indeed fascinating. In addition, he is a man of amazing gifts, with a wide range of almost incredible knowledge; but so competent is Mr. Bailey’s craftsmanship that Dr. Fortune rarely exceeds the bounds of probability. He has, in fact, in a very short time (the first Fortune book, Call Mr. Fortune, appeared in 1919) made a permanent and unquestioned place for himself among the first half-dozen protagonists of detective fiction.
Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s pompous little Belgian sleuth, falls in the category of detectival logicians, and though his methods are also intuitional to the point of clairvoyance, he constantly insists that his surprisingly accurate and often miraculous deductions are the inevitable results of the intensive operation of “the little gray cells.” Poirot is more fantastic and far less credible than his brother criminologists of the syllogistic fraternity, Dr. Priestley, Father Brown and Reginald Fortune; and the stories in which he figures are often so artificial, and their problems so far fetched, that all sense of reality is lost, and consequently the interest in the solution is vitiated. This is particularly true of the short stories gathered into the volume Poirot Investigates. Poirot is to be seen at his best in The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder on the Links. The trick played on the reader in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is hardly a legitimate device of the detective-story writer; and while Poirot’s work in this book is at times capable, the effect is nullified by the dénouement.
Of an entirely different personality, yet with dialectic methods broadly akin to Father Brown’s and Dr. Priestley’s, is Colonel Gore in Lynn Brock’s The Deductions of Colonel Gore and Colonel Gore’s Second Case. Colonel Gore, though ponderous and verbose, is well projected, and the crimes he investigates are well worked-out and admirably, if a bit too leisurely, presented. The various characterizations of the minor as well as the major personages of the plots, and the long descriptions of social and topographical details, tend to detract from the problems involved; but the competency of Mr. Brock’s writing carries one along despite one’s occasional impatience. This fault is not to be found in Ernest M. Poate’s Behind Locked Doors and The Trouble at Pinelands. But Mr. Poate errs on the side of amatory romance, and in Behind Locked Doors he introduces a puppy love affair which both mars and retards what otherwise might have been one of the outstanding modern detective novels. Even as it stands it must be given high rank; and the figure of Dr. Bentiron — an eccentric but lovable psychopathologist — will long remain in the memory of those who make his acquaintance.
No list of what we may call the deductive detectives would be complete without the name of A.E.W. Mason’s admirable Hanaud of the French Sûreté. Hanaud may almost be regarded as the Gallic counterpart of Sherlock Holmes. The methods of these two sleuths are similar: each depends on a combination of material clues and spontaneous thinking; each is logical and painstaking; and each has his own little tricks and deceptions and vanities. The two Hanaud vehicles, At the Villa Rose and The House of the Arrow, are excellent examples of detective fiction, carefully constructed, consistently worked out, and pleasingly written. They represent — especially the latter — the purest expression of this type of literary divertissement; and Hanaud himself is a memorable and engaging addition to the great growing army of fictional sleuths. The psychological methods of crime detection, combined with an adherence to the evidences of reality, are also followed in S.S. Van Dine’s The Benson Murder Case and The “Canary” Murder Case, wherein Philo Vance, a young social aristocrat and art connoisseur, enacts the role of criminologist and investigator.
Although the blind detective is a comparatively recent innovation in crime-mystery fiction, his methods belong necessarily to the logic-cum-intuition school, despite the fact that all his processes and conclusions are accounted for on strictly material and scientific grounds. In the various attempts at novelty made by recent detective-story writers the sightless crime specialist has been frequently introduced, so that now he has become a recognized and accepted type. The most engaging and the most easily accepted of these unique detectives is Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, who made his appearance in a volume bearing his name for title in 1914. To be sure, he was endowed with gifts which recalled the strange powers of the citizens of H.G.Wells’s The Country of the Blind, but so accurately and carefully has Mr. Bramah projected him that he must be given a place in the forefront of famous fictional sleuths. Far more miraculous, and hence less convincing, is the blind detective, Thornley Colton, who appears in a book which also bears his name for title, by Clinton H. Stagg.
As soon as the detective story became popular it was inevitable that the woman detective would make her appearance; and today there are a score or more of female rivals of Sherlock Holmes. The most charming and capable, as well as the most competently conceived, is Violet Strange, who solves eight criminal problems in Anna Katharine Green’s The Golden Slipper. Lady Molly, in Lady Molly of Scotland Yard by the Baroness Orczy, is somewhat more conventional in conception but sufficiently entertaining to be regarded as a worthy deductive sister of Violet Strange. George R. Sims, in Dorcas Dene, Detective, has given us a feminine investigator of considerable quality; and Arthur B. Reeve’s Constance Dunlap has resources and capabilities of a high, even if a too melodramatic, order. Millicent Newberry, in Jeanette Lee’s The Green Jacket, is an unusual and appealing figure — more a corrector of destinies, perhaps, than a detective. And Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee, in a book called simply Judith Lee, while not technically a sleuth, happens upon the secret of many crimes through her ability as a lip-reader.
VIII
So individual and diverse has become the latter-day fictional detective that even a general classification is well-nigh impossible. In Robert Barr’s The Triumphs of Eugéne Valmont we have an Anglicized Frenchman of the old school who undertakes private investigations of a too liberal latitude to qualify him at all times as a crime specialist; but, despite his romantic adventurings and his glaring failures, he unquestionably belongs in our category of famous sleuths if only for the care and excellence with which Mr. Barr has presented his experiences. Then there is the fat, commonplace, unlovely and semi-illiterate, but withal sympathetic and entertaining, Jim Hanvey of Octavus Roy Cohen’s book, Jim Hanvey, Detective, who knows all the crooks in Christendom and is their friend; the nameless logician in the Baroness Orczy’s The Old Man in the Corner and The Case of Miss Elliott, who sits, shabby and indifferent, at his cafe table and holds penetrating post mortems on the crimes of the day; Malcolm Sage, of Herbert H. Jenkins’s Malcolm Sage, Detective, a fussy, bespectacled bachelor who runs a detective agency and uses methods as eccentric as they are efficient; Lord Peter Wimsey, the debonair and deceptive amateur of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Whose Body?; Jefferson Hastings, the pathetic, ungainly old-timer of the Washington Police, whose mellow insight and shrewd deductions make first-rate reading in The Bellamy Case, The Melrose Mystery and No Clue! by James Hay, Jr.; and Inspectors Winter and Furneaux — that amusing and capable brace of co-sleuths in Louis Tracy’s long list of detective novels.
The alienist detective is not a far cry from the pathologist detective, and though there have been several doctors with a flair for abnormal psychology who have enacted the role of criminal investigator, it has remained for Anthony Wynne to give the psychiatrist a permanent place in the annals of detection. In his Dr. Hailey, the Harley Street specialist, (the best of whose cases is related in The Sign of Evil,) we have an admirable detective character who mingles neurology with psychoanalysis and solves many crimes which prove somewhat beyond the ken of the Scotland Yard police. It was Henry James Forman, however, I believe, who gave us the first strictly psychoanalytical detective novel in Guilt — a story which, despite its unconventional ending and its singularity of material, makes absorbing reading.
The reporter sleuth — or “journalistic crime expert” — has become a popular figure in detective fiction on both sides of the Atlantic, and to enumerate his various personalities and adventures would be to fill several small type pages with tabulations. Most famous of this clan is Rouletabille of Gaston Leroux’s excellent detective novels, although J.S.Fletcher has created an engaging rival to the little French reporter in the figure of Frank Spargo who solves the gruesome mystery in The Middle Temple Murder. Another reporter detective of memorable qualities and personality is Robert Estabrook in Louis Dodge’s Whispers; and very recently there has appeared a book by Harry Stephen Keeler — Find the Clock — in which a Chicago reporter named Jeff Darrell acquires the right to sit among the select company of his fellow detective-journalists.
One of the truly outstanding figures in detective fiction is Uncle Abner, whose criminal adventures are recounted by Melville Davisson Post in Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries, and in a couple of short stories included in the volume, The Sleuth of St. James’s Square. Uncle Abner, indeed, is one of the very few detectives deserving to be ranked with that immortal triumverate, Dupin, Lecoq and Holmes; and I have often marveled at the omission of his name from the various articles and criticisms I have seen dealing with detective fiction. In conception, execution, device and general literary quality these stories of early Virginia, written by a man who thoroughly knows his métier and is also an expert in law and criminology, are among the very best we possess. The grim and lovable Uncle Abner is a vivid and convincing character, and the plots of his experiences with crime are as unusual as they are convincing. Mr. Post is the first author who, to my knowledge, has used the phonetic misspelling in a document supposedly written by a deaf and dumb man as a proof of its having been forged. (The device is found in the story called “An Act of God.”) If Mr. Post had written only Uncle Abner he would be deserving of inclusion among the foremost of detective-fiction writers, but in The Sleuth of St. James’s Square, and especially in Monsieur Jonquelle, he has achieved a type of highly capable and engrossing crime-mystery tale. The story called “The Great Cipher” in the latter book is, with the possible exception of Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” the best cipher story in English.
Another distinctive detective, but one of an entirely different character, is Chief Inspector William Dawson of Bennett Copplestone’s The Diversions of Dawson and The Lost Naval Papers — the latter a series of secret-service stories. There is humor in Mr. Copplestone’s delineation of Dawson, but the humor is never flippant and does not, in any sense, detract from the interest of the cases in which this rather commonplace, but none the less remarkable, Scotland Yard master of disguise plays the leading rule. In fact, the humor is so skilfully interwoven in the plots, and is presented with such consummate naturalness, that it heightens both the character drawing of Dawson and the fascination of the problems he is set to solve. The literary quality of Mr. Copplestone’s books is of a high order, and goes far toward placing them among the best of their genre that England has produced. Dawson, for all his shortcomings and conventional devices, is a figure of actuality, with the artificial mechanics of his craft reduced to a minimum.
John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, who runs through a series of novels (The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast and The Three Hostages), is a figure of unforgettable attraction — slow-moving yet shrewd, sentimental yet efficient — although only in the last named of the four books does he play a strictly detectival role, his other “cases” being of a purely adventurous or secret-service nature. A delightful type of detective — debonair, whimsical, yet withal penetrating — is Antony Gillingham of A.A.Milne’s The Red House Mystery — one of the best detective stories of recent years, as well developed as it is well written. I regret that Mr. Milne has seen fit to let his reputation as a writer of detective tales rest on this single volume. Philip Trent, the somewhat baffled nemesis of E.C.Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case, is highly engaging, despite the fact that his elaborate deductions, based on circumstantial evidence, lead him woefully astray. Mr. Bentley’s book, though unconventional in conception, is, in its way, a masterpiece. Another detective deserving of mention alongside of Antony Gillingham and Philip Trent is Anthony Gethryn, the solver of the criminal riddle in Philip MacDonald’s entertaining book, The Rasp — which, incidentally, is Gethryn’s sole vehicle of deduction.