Watching the detectives: reading dime novels and hard-boiled detective stories in context - Review Essay - Book Review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2002 by Jay Hopler

What is also beyond me is how Ronald R. Thomas, Professor of English and Vice President of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, could have written a book about nineteenth and early-twentieth-century detective fiction in what appears to be complete ignorance of the copious scholarship that has been done in the field. Apparently, I was wrong when I said that Michael Denning and his work are huge landmarks that are impossible to ignore--Thomas's Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science ignores it completely as it does almost everyone and everything else--that's odd when you consider that it takes as its focus the same two time periods and subject matter as Mechanic Accents and Hard-boiled. One would expect, as Detective Fiction was published in 2000, to see a certain amount of overlap of its sources with the sources of the previous two. Not so. Thomas goes to Poe and Doyle, Hemingway and Hawthorne. When he does cite scholars, he cites primarily literary scholars: people like John T. Irwin, whose b ook, The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytical Detective Story, did for the analytical detective story what Denning's Mechanic Accents did for the nineteenth-century dime novel. However, I should point out that Mechanic Accents, though dry, is still an extremely viable text--The Mystery to a Solution, for all of its insights, is impenetrable.

But perhaps Thomas's decision to search for sources in the literature section of the library is as it should be. Detective Fiction, though it focuses on "certain forensic devices [that] enable the body to function both as text and as politics in [detective fiction]," (3) is far more a work of literary criticism than either Denning's Mechanic Accents or Smith's Hard-boiled. Instead of looking at what the fiction can tell us about the culture--what Denning and Smith do--Thomas looks at what the culture can tell us about the fiction. From the introduction:

Like the inquiry of the [fictional] detective, this book begins ... with the strategies of interpretation and authentication the detective brings to bear on the body of the criminal and victim alike. I attend in particular to the authority the literary detective claims for himself through the "devices" by which he discovers the truth and defines an identity, calling attention to the way those technologies relate to broader questions of subjectivity and cultural authority at decisive moments in the evolution of the genre in nineteenth-century England and America. (3)

Thomas attempts to make his argument be examining what he terms "three critical points in the history of the literary detective" (5): the invention of the form by Edgar Allen Poe with his three C. August Dupin stories, "Murders in the Rue Morgue," The Purloined Letter" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (2); the perfection of the form by Arthur Conan Doyle with his Sherlock Holmes stories; and the rejection of the "golden age" in the works of Hammett and Chandler in the 1920s and 30s. And as methodologies go, that's not a bad one. The problem is that he tends to make audacious assertions (see second endnote, below) and leaps of logic and reason that he never adequately supports. In short, Thomas is looking in the right place, considering the questions he wants to answer; unfortunately, he is not looking in the right way--either that or he isn't looking hard enough.