It Takes a Detective

I confess. I love mysteries and I love science fiction. So, it’s natural that I’d love novels that blend the two. In particular, I’ve enjoyed my friend Alex Morgan‘s series of Psionic Detective novels. In fact, I enjoyed them so much that I suggested in January that we collaborate on one. We both had so much fun that we wrote another, then another. We’re now on our fourth.

For me, that’s an amazing pace—three complete, 60,000+ word novels in six months. One reason is that my coauthor is amazing. His considerable skills at plotting and characterization easily chop my own thinking time in half, if not by more. The fact that we’re having fun is, of course, another reason. It helps that we also usually start with some real-life case as the generic basis for the crime. Then we more or less alternate writing chapters. That means there’s that guy at the other end, tapping his foot, waiting for the next chapter. That implicit deadline adds motivation, even though we both have other things to do and often there are lags in chapters. The pressure is all imaginary, but it’s still real.

There’s another, more basic reason why these go faster, though: the basic story arc is already set. There’s a murder. Someone discovers it. Our intrepid Psionic Corps detective gets involved, and his skills play a roll in the investigation. The investigation turns into an adventure, and he eventually solves the crime. In the ones Alex and I have written together, the Psionic Detective has a regular guy for sidekick, and I usually write the chapters in that are in character’s point of view.

This formula is just a variation of the tried-and-true detective novel which has been around since April, 1841 when the genre was invented.

It’s not common that one can so precisely date when a genre was born, but in this case it’s clear. One story published that year included the following elements:

• A crime is committed
• An eccentric detective investigates
• This detective appers in a series of subsequent stories
• The detective has a non-eccentric sidekick (an everyman)
• The crime occurs in an urban setting
• The detective has a disdain for law enforcement
• The story fictionalizes a real-life case
• The readers have the same clues as the detective and so could theoretically solve the case
• Notwithstanding knowing all the clues, the detective’s revelation of the criminal is a surprise
• The crime occures in a locked room

This set of elements had never before occurred in one piece of fiction. In fact, the “locked room” concept, where the crime occurred in a room locked from the inside, first appeared in this story and has since devolved into an entire sub-genre. The story, of course, is The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the author is Edgar Allen Poe.

Not only is this the first detective story, it established the foundation for all subsequent such stories. An important feature is the surprise revelation of WhoDunIt–in the case of Murders, it’s is an orangutan. This story and its killer are so iconic that they’ve even been parodied in a TV sitcom. See Retirement is Murder, the second episode of season twelve of Frasier. Here, the eponymous doctor hilariously “solves” one of Martin’s open cases by announcing the monkey did it.

So far, the stories Alex and I have written have included all of these basic elements except the locked room. To be sure, there’s a different detective in each story, but they are all outsiders, members of the elite, and sometimes despised, Psionic Corps.

The perceptive reader will recognize Sherlock Holmes uses the same elements. Even Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason has all of these features, with Paul Drake serving as the sidekick. Both of these classic heroes also have a disdain for law enforcement, which is often corrupt and almost always incompetent. Alex’s Psionic Detectives are part of law enforcement, but their eccentricity—namely their psionic talents—makes them outsiders and regular law enforcement skeptics.

The detective novel has endured for all this time for several reasons. For one thing, it’s adaptable. Arthur Conan Doyle made the investigations into adventures and his detective relatable, both improvements and additions to Poe’s model. There are other examples of outsider detectives, including Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Agatha Christys’ Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot , and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Each of these are unique, and each author added innovations to the genre. For example, Christy invented “cozy mysteries,” puzzle stories often set in the English countryside. In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Mikael Blomkvist added the Swedish countryside to the settings.

The genre has diversified in other ways, too, to include for example gay detectives (Michael Nava’s Henry Rios) and African-American detectives (Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins). Each detective shares a certain alienation from broader society, letting them stand outside and analyze from afar. The various sidekicks anchor the stories in the real world with their everyman universality.

The story arcs have morphed over time, too. Jeff Lindsay’s Deeply Dreaming Dexter features a blood-splatter CSI detective who is also a serial killer. Talk about an outsider! This novel, and later ones in the series, are both police procedurals and moral adventures, where Dexter chooses his victims based on the failings of the criminal justice system.

But if the story arcs are all fundamentally the same, why do people keep coming back to them? Well, in the first place, not all the story arcs are the same—just the best-selling ones. But that’s for another essay. What almost all detective novels do have in common is that the detective solves the crime. Poe’s Auguste Dupin and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes use reason and evidence to outsmart the criminal. The detective novel is a contest between the criminal and the detective.

A key feature that Poe innovated is that the story is honest with the reader, in that the reader knows exactly the same evidence as the detective. All of it, including the evidence that, despite appearances, doesn’t bear on the crime. In The Hounds of the Baskervilles, it’s not even explicit evidence, but rather the lack of it, namely that the dog did not bark, that solves the crime. This makes the detective story also a contest between the reader and the detective.

Finally, underpinning these detective mysteries is an optimistic, almost romantic, view that we can make sense of the world through reason, deduction, and logic. The world may seem to be a strange and scary place, full of disorder and criminality, but in solving the crime, the detective replaces chaos with order and returns the world to its normal state. Even in the noir sub-genre, where the normal world is irredeemably filled with chaos and crime, the detective still applies evidence and deduction, along with a willingness to be endlessly be beaten up, to solve the crime.

The main reason the genre has survived all this time, I think, is its uriversality. Originally, detectives were mostly white, mostly English or American, and all male. But now there are Japanese detectives, female detectives, gay detectives, even serial killer detectives. It takes a detective, an outsider, to solve the crime and, in doing so, to make sense of a frightening and often hostile universe. Jim Rockford of the Rockford Files is a model for the modern detective: a steadfast outsider, a good guy, relatable and common, at odds with a corrupt and indifferent world. Like Sir Thomas More, the detective is a character for all seasons.