简单的谋杀艺术 /
The Simple Art Of Murder
雷蒙德·钱德勒 /
Raymond Chandler
董乐山 译
任何形式的小说都是想写成现实主义的。从现在的眼光来看，老式的小说装腔作势，矫揉造作，几乎到了滑稽可笑的程度，但当初读到它们的人，并不觉得那样。象菲尔丁和斯莫莱特那样的作家，从现代意义上所以能显得是现实主义的，乃是因为他们笔下的人物大部分是一些肆无忌惮的角色，其中有不少人能够抢在警察头里两步，但是简·奥斯汀所描绘的以乡绅生活为背景的极其拘谨的人物，从心理学的角度来看，也似乎是够现实的。社会上和感情上的这种虚伪风气，今天仍大量存在。只要再放手加上一些附庸风雅的成分，你就可以大致领略你所订阅的报上书评栏的调子和俱乐部里读书小组的一本正经、愚昧自满的气氛了。畅销书就是他们这种人造成的。所谓畅销书，其实是靠做宣传推广工作，其基础是一种间接的附庸风雅心理，有批评界的老手打上的印记做保鏣，某些极有势力的幕后集团的精心爱护，不断浇水。这些集团的本行是推销书籍，但是却希望给你的印象是他们在提倡文化。你只要书款稍许迟付了一些，就可以明白他们的旨趣是何等清高了。
为了种种原因，侦探小说很少能够做宣传推广工作。它写的往往是谋杀案，因此缺少精神高尚的因素。谋杀是个人意志受挫的表现，因此也是整个人类意志受挫的表现，可能含有大量的社会学意义，事实上也确实如此。但是谋杀的事早已习以为常，已不是什么新闻了。如果疑案小说多少有些现实主义以（实际上很少这样），那么就一定是用一种冷眼分明的态度写的；否则除了精神变态者以外，谁也不会想去写它或读它。谋杀小说那种不管其他闲事，只管解决自己难题，解答自己疑问的作风也是令人沮丧的。剩下来就没有什么可讨论的了，除了它写得够不够精采可以算得上好小说，不过为数五十万的读者反正是不懂这个的。鉴别写作的质量，甚至对以此为业的人来说，要对预约销售量不加太多的注意而做到这一点，也是够难的。
侦探小说（也许我还是这么叫它为好，因为这一行仍以英国写法为主）必须靠慢慢的渗透才能扩大它的读者。这种情况的存在，而且以后也这么顽固地存在，乃是事实。原因何在，值得有心人研究，我则没有这样的耐心。我的论点之中也丝毫并不认为，侦探小说是一种重要的有意义的艺术形式。世上没有重要的有意义的艺术形式，有的只是艺术，而且也少得可怜。各国人口的增长丝毫没有带来艺术的增长，所增长的只是可以用来生产和包装艺术代用品的熟练手腕。?
尽管如此，即使是最老式的侦探小说，也很难写得好。这门艺术的好作品比好的严肃小说更是少见得多。第二流的作品比大多数周转率高的小说寿命要长，很多根本不应该问世的作品就是不肯去世。它们象公园里的塑像同样而久，而且同样乏味。
对于所谓有识别力的人来说，这是很讨厌的。他们很不喜欢这样的情况：不久前还是深刻重要的作品，如今放在他们图书馆里标出“去年畅销书”的专门书架上，除了偶然有个近视的顾客弯下身子看了一眼就匆匆走开以外，没有人会走近它们。而老太太们则在疑案小说书架前你推我挤，抓一本书名叫《三重谋杀害》或《平契波特深长探险记》之类的同一年份的产品。他们也很不喜欢这样的情况：在再版书架上“真正重要的作品”积上了尘土，而《死亡系上了吊裤带》却印行了五万册，甚至十万册，摆在全国的报摊上，显然不是为了向大家告别。
老实说，我本人对这种情况也不是很满意的。我在不假装正经的时候也写写侦探小说。但是由于这种长寿不老，使得竞争实在有点太厉害。要是每年高等物理学有三百篇论文发表，另外还有好几千篇各种形式的论文也已准备就绪，放在那里，有人阅读，那么即使爱因斯坦也是没有多大用武之地的。
海明威不知在什么地方说过，优秀的作家只同死者竞争。优秀的侦探小说作家（这种人毕竟有几个）则不仅要同所有没有埋葬的死者，还要同所有大批大批的活着的人竞争。而且是在几乎平等的条件下进行竞争，因为这种写作的特点之一是，吸引读者阅读这种作品的因素，永远不会过时。那个主人公的领带可能有些老式了，那个探长老头儿可能是坐单驾马车来的，不是坐警笛嘶鸣的流线型汽车，但是他到了现场以后所做的事仍是象过去那样核对时间，寻找烧焦的纸片，研究是准踩了书房窗户下开得好好的草莓花圃。
但是，我对这件事的关心还有一个不那么自私的动机。我觉得，要在这样庞大的规模上生产侦探小说，而它们的作者眼前能得到的报酬却如此微薄，他们对批评界的赞誉的需要又几乎是零，这项工作如果需要什么才能的话，那是无法办到的。在这个意义上，批评家的瞠口吃惊和出版商的推销次货是完全合乎逻辑的。中等水平的侦探小说大概不比中等水平的小说坏，但是你是从来也看不到中等水平的小说的。因为它得不到出版。但是中等水平的——或者略为高出一些的——侦探小说却可以得到出版。不仅得到出版，而已成批地卖给外借的图书馆，有人阅读。甚至有少数热心家，他们按两元钱的正式零售价格购买，因为书是新书，封面上还有一具死尸的图片。
奇怪的是，这种中等水平的、十分平庸而又枯燥无味的小说，完全是不现实和机械的作品，同那些有这门艺术杰作之称的作品，并没有太多的不同。它只是拖得更慢一些，对话更加平淡一些，人物的刻画更加呆板一些，噱弄读者的手法更加明显一些面已；但货色则是一样。而好小说和环小说却一点也不是同样的货色。它写的是完全不同的事情。好侦探小说和坏侦探小说写的却完全是同样的事情，而且写法也很相象（这有它的原因，而原因又有原因；要找原因，总是有的）。
我认为，传统的即典型的即单纯推理的即逻辑推理的侦探小说，其主要的困难是，它要达到十全十美，必须具备各种各样的条件，而这些条件不是在一个人的身上所能同时找到的。那个头脑冷静、善于布局的人，不一定也能写出生动的角色，尖锐的对白，掌握步步加紧的节奏，恰到好处地利用所观察到的细节。那个不苟言笑、擅长逻辑的人，制造出来的气氛就超不过一块绘画板。那个注重科学的私家侦探尽管有个非常新式漂亮的实验室，但是抱歉的是我记不起脸孔来了。能够为你写一篇生动如画、丰富多来的散文的那个家伙，却不屑化功夫去逐个推理无懈可击的作案时不在现场的证明，因为这项工作实在吃力。
冷门知识的大师从心理学上来说是生活在有环撑的裙子的时代（指十八、九世纪。）。如果你对陶器工艺和埃及针织艺术的基本知识什么都知道，那么你对警察就一点也不了解。如果你知道自金不到华氏二千八百度左右不会自行熔解，那么你就不会知道二十世纪的人如何作爱。如果你对战前法国滨海胜地的悠闲生活有足够的了解，而把你的故事放在那个地点，那么你就不知道两小粒可以一起吞下的安眠药不仅杀不死一个人——甚至不能使他入睡，只要他不想睡的话。
每个侦探小说作家都犯错误。没有一个对错误有自知之明。柯南·道尔所犯的错误使他的有的故事根本不能成立，但是他是个拓荒者，歇洛克·福尔摩斯基本上毕竟是一种态度和几十行令人难忘的对白。真正叫我泄气的是霍华德·海克拉夫特先生（在他的《供解闷的谋杀案》一书中）称为侦探小说黄金时代的女士们和先生们。这个时代并不远。按海克拉夫特先生的划分，它从第一次世界大战结束以后开始，一直到1930年左右。实际上这个时代至今仍旧存在。所有已出版的侦探小说中有三分之二到四分之三仍信奉这一时代的巨人所创造、所改进、所完善的，并且作为逻辑推理的问题兜售给世人的公式。
这话说得有些严厉，但不要吃惊。这只是说说而已。我们不妨采肴一看这门文学的一部得意之作，一部掌握了噱弄读者而没有欺骗读者的艺术的公认杰作。这部作品叫《红房子疑案》，是A·A·米尔内写的，亚力山大·伍尔科特（真是个爱夸大其词的人）誉为“三部空前绝后的最佳疑案小说之一”。这样的赞词不是轻易说的。这本书出版于1922年，不过确是没有什么时间性，完全可以拿来在1939年7月出版，或者稍加修改，拿来在上星期出版。它一共再版了十三次，用原来的纸型印行了大约十六年。不论什么书都很少有这样的情况。这本书读起来很轻松，文笔风趣有点象《笨拙》杂志，行文流畅，造成一种错觉，其实并不象表面看来那样自如。
它讲的是马克·阿勃莱特在他的朋友面前冒充他的弟弟罗伯特的故事。马克是红房子的主人，这是一座典型的英国乡间宅邸，花草遍地，大门口还有一所看门人的小屋。他的秘书鼓励、怂恿他冒充自己的弟弟，因为如果他冒充成功，他的秘书就要下手杀害他。红房子一带的人谁也没有见过罗伯特，他去澳大利亚已有十五年，他们只知他有不务正业的浪荡公子的名声。有一封罗伯特寄来的信曾经谈起过，但从来没有拿出来过。这封信说他要来了，马克已作了暗示，这不会是件愉快的事。有一天下午，传说中的那个罗伯特来了，向两个佣人表明了自己的身分同，给带到了书房里，马克（根据后来传讯时的证词）跟着进去。接着就发现罗伯特躺在地板上死了，脸都有个枪弹洞，马克当然就此消声匿迹。警察闻讯赶来，怀疑凶手一定是马克，把尸体搬走，进行调查，接着进行传讯。
米尔内是意识到一个非常困难的障碍的，他竭力想越过它。既然马克一扮罗伯特出现他的秘书就要杀害他，那么冒充的事就必须继续下去，瞒过警察。而且既然红房子一带的人都很熟知马克，伪装就很必要。因此就把马克的胡子剃去，把他的手弄得粗糙（根据证词——“不是一个老爷的指甲修剪整齐的手”），用了粗哑的嗓子和粗野的举止。
但这还不够。警察要查验尸体，尸体所穿的衣服，和口袋里所有的东西的。因此这一切东西都不能使人想到马克头上去。因此米尔内想方设法拚命要使人相信这样的动机：马克是个极其自负的表演家，他演这个角色非常彻底，连袜子和内衣都换了装（秘书把制造厂家的商标都拆了下来），就象一个江湖演员为了要演奥赛罗把全身都涂黑了一样。如果在读者那里能得售（销路记录证明一定是得售了），米尔内估计他就站得住了。但是不论这个故事的结构是多么单薄，它是作为逻辑推理问题提供给读者的。
如果不是逻辑推理问题，那它就什么也不是了。因为别的什么都算不上。如果情节牵强，你就甚至不能把它当作一部轻松小说，因为它没有故事。如果逻辑推理问题中没有真实情况和能自圆其说的因素，它就不成其为逻辑推理问题。如果逻辑是个错觉，那就没有东西可以推理。如果冒充身分所必须具备的条件一告诉读者就冒充不成，那么整个事情就是弄虚作假的。不是有意的弄虚作假，因为米尔内如果知道他会遇到什么困难，他就不会与这故事。他所遇到的是一些致命的弱点，他连其中一项也没有考虑过。不经心的读者显然也是如此，他们喜欢这个故事，因此愿意相信它。但是不能要求读者都知道生活的现实，作家才是这方面的专家。这位作家所忽略的有下面这几点：
一、验尸宫召集陪审团举行正式传讯，但对尸体却没有提出法律上合格的身份证明。一般大城市里的验尸官对于一具无法验明身份的尸体也是会举行传讯的，只要这种传讯的记录具有价值或可能具有价值（火灾、惨祸、谋杀的证据等等）。但这里并不存在这种理由，也没有人认明尸体。有两个证人说，该人自称罗伯特·阿勃莱特。这仅仅是假定，只有在没有出现与此矛盾的证据的情况下才有效。验明身份是传讯的前提。即使死了以后，一个人也有拥有自己身份的权利。只要人力办得到，验尸官就要保证实现这种权利。否则就是玩忽职守。
二、既然马克·阿勃莱特已告失踪，而且有杀人嫌疑，不能为自己辩护，那就有必要找到他在谋杀害发生前后的动向的证据（还有他身边是否有钱可以逃跑）；然而这种证据都是最接近谋杀案的人提供的，没有旁证。在没有证实之前，这就必然是不可信的。
三、警方经过直接调查，发现罗伯特·阿勒莱特在他家乡的村子里名声不佳。那里一定有人认识他。他没有把这样的人带来传讯（故事在这一点上站不住脚）。
四、警方知道，罗伯特此来有威胁的成分在内。这与谋杀案有关，这一点他们势必知道。但是他们没有设法调查罗伯特在澳大利亚的情况，也没有去弄清楚他在那里名声如何，有什么来往，甚至是不是真的到英国来了，是同谁一起来的（要是他们调查一下，就早会发现他死了已有三年了）。
五、警方医生检查了尸体，胡子是刚刚刮掉的（露出的皮肤未经日晒），粗糙的手是不自然的，而且身体是一个久居寒带、生活优越的有钱人的身体。而罗伯特却是一个粗人，在澳大利亚生活了十五年。医生所得知的情况就是这样。他不可能没有发现尸体情况与此相矛盾。?
六、衣服是无名的，口袋空空如也，商标都拆掉了。但是穿这衣服的人总有个身份。完全可以断定，他不是他自称的那个人。但对这可疑之点却没有采取任何行动。而且甚至从来没有想到这是可疑的。
七、有一个人失了综，他是本地的一个著名人士，在太平间里的尸体很象他。警方不可能在一开始时就先排除失踪的人就是死人这个可能性。没有比证明这一点更容易的事了。根本没有想到这一点，令人不能置信。这是为了使警察显得是傻瓜笨蛋，好让一个鲁莽冒失的业余侦探拿出一个假的答案来一鸣惊人。
这个案件中的侦探是个满不在乎的业余侦探，名叫安东尼·吉林汉的小伙子，目光炯炯，满腔热情，在伦敦有一所舒服的小公寓，气度有点自命不凡。他担任这项工作并不是为了赚钱，但是碰到本地警察忘了笔记本，他总是在场为你放劳。英国警察似乎颇能容忍他，他们一贯有这种好脾气。但是我一想到要是他落到我们家自己城里的警察的手里，我就不寒而栗。
这门艺术有的是比这还要说不通的例子。在《特伦特的最后一个案件》（常常被称为“完美无缺的侦探小说）中，你得接受这样的前提：一个稍一皱眉就会使华尔街索索发抖的国际金融巨头，为了要把自己的秘书送上纹刑架而策划自己的死亡，而且那个秘书给逼得走投无路时竟能保持高贵的缄默，也许那是他身上的伊顿使风（伊顿公学是英国一所最著名的贵族子弟中学）。我认识的国际金融巨头很少，但是我想这本小说的作者如果可能认识的话，他所认识的就一定更少了。
另外有一个例子，是弗里曼·威尔斯·克罗夫茨（在他不太想入非非的时候是他们中间最稳健的一个）写的，其中的凶手依靠化妆之助，在时间上作千钧一发的安排，采取非常巧妙的躲闪行动，冒充了刚被他杀死的人，因此能在远离作案的地方复活出现。桃洛赛·塞伊尔斯也有一个例子，其中有一个人深夜在自己的屋子里被谋杀了，谋杀的方法是用一种机械发动的重物把他压死的。其所以能这样是因为他总是在这个时候打开收音机，总是站在收音机前的同一地位，总是俯身弯腰到这个距离。要是稍许朝前或错后一些，那么观众就要退票了。这就是俗话所说的老天爷帮了忙。一个谋杀犯如果需要老天爷帮这么大忙，他就一定选错了行业。
阿加莎·克里斯蒂有一个故事（指《东方快车谋杀案》），主角是那个谈话用直译过来的小学生法语的聪明过人的比利时人赫尔克里·波洛先生。在这个故事里，波治先生照理用他的“小小灰色细胞”（指波洛的脑子）忙碌一阵子后得出结论，卧车车厢里没有一个人有可能单独行凶，因此人人都参与其间，把整个过程分为一系列的简单动作，就象装配一只打蛋器一样。这种类型的故事保证可以使脑筋最灵的人也拍案叫绝。只有傻瓜才猜得着。
这些作家和他们这一派的其他作家也有比这好得多的结构。可能在什么地方有一个真正经得起严密考察，读起来一定很有趣，哪怕不得不翻回到第四十七页上去，再记一记清楚那个花匠师傅是在什么时候把赢得头奖的茶玫瑰秋海棠移栽到花盆里的。这种故事没有什么新鲜的东西；也没有什么陈旧的东西。我提到的一些例子都是英国的，只是因为权威人士（如果够得上称为权威人士的话）似乎觉得英国作家在这老一套方面略胜一等，而美国作家（甚至菲洛·凡斯——大概可以算是侦探小说中最愚蠢的角色了——的创作者）也只够得上乙组的水平。
这种典型的侦探小说既没有学到什么东西，也没有忘记什么东西。这是你几乎每个星期都可以从大型漂亮的杂志中找到的，有漂亮的插图，对于处女的爱情和正当的奢侈品都予以应有的尊重。可能速度稍为加快了一些，对白稍为油滑了一些。要的酒更多的是冰镇的代基里鸡尾酒，不再是陈年葡萄酒。衣服是《时尚》式的，室内装饰是《美丽家庭》式的，更加时髦了，但不一定更加真实。我们有更多的时间泡在迈阿密海滩的旅馆里和科德海角的避暑胜地，不再到伊丽沙白女王时代花园里久经风雨吹打的日晷旁散步了。
但是把嫌疑犯细心收集起来的手法，基本上还是相同的。还有正当波丁顿·波斯尔威特三世的夫人在十五位各色各样的客人面前，喝拉克米的钟声歌降了高音阶的半个音阶时，竟有人用硬梆梆的白金匕首刺了她一刀，这一妙着是怎么做到的，完全使人无法理解，这基本上也相同。还有身穿镶着皮裘的睡衣的天真姑娘半夜里尖声惊叫，惊动了大伙儿从房中跑进跑出，乱成一团，再也无法交代清楚具体的时间，这基本上也相同。还有第二天大家都戴着圆顶小礼帽，坐在一起喝新加坡鸡尾酒，个个情绪不好，讲话刺来刺去，而那个笨蛋警察却爬来爬去在波斯地毯下寻找线索，这基本上也相同。
我个人倒是喜欢英国的写法。它不那么一碰就碎，里面的人物大体来说都是一样穿衣，喝酒。背景有真实感，好象契斯开克宅邸确实存在，不仅仅是镜头中所见，在山坡上有更多的长时间散步，人物的举止不象刚受过米高梅影片公司的考试。英国作家也许不是世界上最优秀的作家，但他们至少是最优秀的沉闷作家，无人可以与他们相比。
所有这些故事，都可以用一句很简单的话来概括：思想上来说，它们谈不上是个难题，从艺术上来说，它们谈不上是部小说。它们都是闭门造车，对世界上的事情太无知了。它们要保持诚实，但诚实是一种艺术。蹩脚作家不诚实，但自己并不意识到。比较好的作家可能不诚实，因为他不知道该在什么事情上要诚实。他以为一个复杂的谋杀案能使懒情的读者迷惑，一定也能使警方迷惑。他以为懒惰的读者不会去—一详记细节，殊不知警方的本职却是不放过细节。
双脚跷在办公桌上的弟兄们知道，世界上最容易破案的谋杀是有人机关算尽，自以为万无一失的谋杀；教他们真正伤脑筋的是谋杀前两分钟才动念的谋杀。但是如果侦探小说的作者要写这种真正发生的谋杀案，他们就也得写一写实际生活的真实气息。由于他们做不到这一点，他们就自称他们所写的就是应该那样写的。这是想当然——他们中间的佼佼者是知道这一点的。
桃洛赛·赛伊尔斯在《犯罪选集》第一卷的前言中写道：“它（侦探小说）达不到，而目永远也达不到文学造诣的最高水平。”她在别的地方还表示，这是因为侦探小说是一种”遁世文学”，不是“言志文学”。我不知道什么才算是文学造诣的最高水平，埃斯库罗斯和莎士比亚固然也不知道，赛伊尔斯女士恐怕也不知道。如果其他条件相等——这一点永远做不到——那么一个比较有力的主题一定会有比较好的成绩。但是有一些写上帝的书非常沉闷，而写怎么不失诚实地谋杀方法的书却写得很好。关键的问题总是，这是谁写的和他有什么可写的。
至于言志文学和遁世文学，这都是批评家的行活，他们爱用这种抽象的字眼，好象其中有具体的含义一样。凡是用活力写的东西都表现了这种活力；没前沉闷的题材，只有沉闷的脑袋。凡是读书的人，都是想从中寻求某种的逃避；关于梦的性质可以有不同的意见，但是梦所产生的逃避却是生理需要。人人有时都必须从他们隐秘思想的死气沉沉循环下面逃避出来。这是有思想的动物的生活内容的一部分。这是他们有别于三趾树獭（南美洲等地产的一种哺乳动物，栖于森林，行动迟缓。）的区别之一。后者显然——不过谁也没有绝对把握——很自得其乐地倒悬在树枝之下，甚至连瓦尔特·辛普曼的政论也不读。我并不特别鼓吹侦探小说是理想的遁世方法。我只是说，凡是为消遣而读书都是看遁世，不论读的是希腊文，还是数学，天文学，克罗齐的美学，还是《被遗忘的人的日记》。否则你在文化上就是个假充内行，但在生活的艺术上却是个不成熟的孩子。
我觉得桃治赛·赛伊尔斯女士并不是因为这些考虑而尝试一下无用的批评的。
我认为她心中真正感到不安的是，她慢慢地明白，她那种侦探小说已成了一种枯燥的公式，甚至不能满足它自己的条件。这是第二流文学，因为它写的不是可以作为第一流文学的材料。如果它着手写真实的人（她有这能力，她的次要人物可以为证），那么为了要符合情节要求的人工做作的布局，这些真实的人马上就要做不真实的事。他们一做不真实的事，他们自己也就不再真实了。他们变成了木偶，机械情人，纸糊恶棍和侦探，什么都很细致讲究，个个都很彬彬有礼。
对于这些人物道具，唯一能够感到满意的作家是那种不知现实为何物作家，桃治赛·赛伊尔斯自己的小说表明，她对这老一套是感到讨厌的。这些小说中具有成为侦探小说的成分的那一部分是它们最弱的部分，而最出色的部分却是可以删掉而又不影响“逻辑推理”问题的部分。然而她又不能让，也不愿让她的角色有自己的思想，让他们制造自己的疑案。要那么做，所需要的就比她自己简单得多和直接得多的头脑。
《漫长的周末》是一部记述第一次世界大战以后十年中英国生活和世态方面极其出色的著作。罗伯特·格雷夫斯和阿仑·霍奇在这部书中也谈到了一些侦探小说。这两位作家象黄金时代的装饰品一样，是地道的英国人，他们写到的这个时代里的这些侦探小说作家几乎与世界上任何其他作家一样名闻遐迩。他们的各种作品销路以百万计，译成十多国文字。就是这些作家固定了形式，确定了规则，成立了著名的侦探小说俱乐部，这是英国疑案小说的庙堂神殿。会员名单中几乎包括了自从柯南·道尔以来的每一位重要的侦探小说作家。
但是格雷夫斯和霍奇认为，在这整个时期中，只有一个第一流作家写过侦探小说。那是位美国作家，名叫达谢尔·哈梅特。不管是不是老派的，格雷夫斯和霍奇决不是古板守旧的第二流作家鉴赏家；他们能够看到世界的潮流，而且看到他们时代的侦探小说所不能看到的；他们知道有创见和有能力生产真实小说的作家是不会生产不真实的作品的。
哈梅特到底是怎样一个有独创的作家，这无关紧要，即使有关，现在也很难断定。他是他们一派作家中间的一个，但是却是唯一赢得批评界赏识的一个，不过不是唯一写现实主义疑案小说或作这类尝试的一个。任何文学运动都是如此，总有一个人被选出来代表整个运动，他往往是该运动的顶峰。哈梅特是个一流的表演家，但是他的作品中没有什么东西在海明威的早期长短篇小说中没有包含的。
然而，海明威除了从德莱塞、林·拉德纳、卡尔·桑德堡、舍伍德·安德逊和他本人那里学习到一些东西以外，很可能从哈梅特那里也学习到一些东西，这也未可知。相当长的一个时期以来，就一直有人对小说的语言和素材进行彻底革命的返真归朴的尝试。这可能是从诗歌开始的；几乎什么事情都是从诗歌开始的。你甚至可以追溯到瓦尔特·惠特曼。但是哈梅持把这应用到侦探小说上面去，由于英国式的斯文和美国式的假斯文的重压，这很难推动。
哈梅特有没有什么明确的艺术目的，对此我有怀疑。他只不过是想象写作一些他有第一手材料的东西谋生糊口罢了。有的是他杜撰出来的，所有作家都是如此，但他有事实根据，是从真实的东西中杜撰出来的。而英国侦探小说作家所知道的唯一现实性乃是苏比东和博格诺雷吉斯两地的讲话口音。如果他们写到王侯爵爷和威尼斯古瓶，他们所知道的情况并不是根据切身的经验，正如好莱坞的著名人士对于挂在他贝尔—埃尔别墅墙上法国现代派名画或他当茶几用的漆本代尔古董木凳一样无知。哈梅特把谋杀案从威尼斯古瓶中搬出来，放到了穷街陋巷里，它不用长久呆在那里，但是能够开始尽可能同爱美丽·波斯特心目中一个有教养的小姐该怎样啃鸡翅膀的想法离得远一些，这不失为一个好主意。
哈梅特从一开始（而且几乎一直到最后）就是为那些对人生抱积极进取态度的人写作的。他们不怕事物的阴暗面，因为他们就生活在那里。暴力并不使他们害怕，因为暴力就出现在他们的街头。哈梅特把谋杀案还给了有杀人理由的人，不仅仅是提供一具尸体而已；还给了手头有凶器的人，这种凶器不是手工打铸的决斗手枪，毒箭，热带鱼。他把这些人物如实地形诸笔墨，他们的谈话和思想所用的语言就是他们平常用来谈话和思想的语言。
他有风格，但他的读者不知道，因为他所用的语言一般人认为不可能有这种讲究的语言。他们以为谈到的只一出有血有肉的紧张好戏，所用的语言就是他们自己说的语言。从某种意义上来说，确是如此，但远远还不仅是如此。所有的语言都以说话开始，而且是以普通人的说话开始，但是一发展到成为文学手段，它就只在外表上看上去象说话了。哈梅特的风格要说坏就是坏在几乎象一页《伊壁鸠鲁派马里乌斯》一样的形式化，但要说好就好在几乎什么都能表达。这种风格不是属于哈梅特一个人的，也不是属于任何一个人的，这是美国语言（而且也不再是纯粹的美国语言了），我认为这种风格能够表达他本来不知道怎么表达或感到有必要表达的话。在他的手里，这种风格没有什么联想，没有什么回声，除了远远的一座小山以外，唤不起什么形象。
有人说哈梅特没有心肠，但是他自己最看重的一部小说是写朋友之间义气的故事。他着墨不多，用字简练，感情不露，但他一次又一次地做了只有最优秀的作家才能做到的事。他写出来的场面似乎是以前从来没有人写过的。
尽管有这种种特点，他并没有破坏正规的侦探小说。没有人能够；大规模生产要求有一种可以大规模生产的形式。现实主义需要太多的才能，太多的知识，太多的意识。哈梅特可能在这里把它放松了一些，在那里又把它尖锐了一些。没有疑问，除了最愚蠢和最浮夸的作家以外，谁都比以前更意识到他们的矫揉造作。他用事实证明，侦探小说可以成为严肃的写作。《马尔他之鹰》可能是，也可能不是一部天才作品，但是能写出这部作品的艺术，“依此类推”，没有写不出来的东西。一部侦探小说一旦能够写得这么好，只有学究才会不承认不能写得更好。
哈梅特还有一个功劳，他使得写侦探小说成了一件乐事，而不是煞费脑筋地搜集琐碎的线索。没有他，很可能就没有象珀西瓦尔·王尔德的《传讯》那样设想巧妙的地域性疑案小说，或者象雷恭·波斯特盖特的《十二人的裁决》那样有力的讽刺作品，或者象肯尼思·菲林的《思想匕首》那样充满了模棱两可的言论的淋漓尽致之作，或者象唐纳·汉德逊的《波林先生买报》那样把凶手美化的悲喜剧，或者象理查·莎尔的《拉北路斯第七号》那样开好莱坞式愉快的玩笑。?
现实主义的风格很容易糟蹋：由于匆忙从事，由于缺少意识，由于不能解决作家的表达愿望与表达能力之间的差距。现实主义的凤格很容易伪造；残暴并不是力量，俏皮并不是机智，充满刺激的文章可以象平淡的文章一样令人厌倦；跟水性杨花的金发女郎打情骂消如果由一个年轻的色鬼来描写，他除了一心只想描写这种打情写消以外别无其他目的，则写出来很可能是非常沉闷的东西。这样的情况已数见不鲜，因此，如果一部侦探小说里有一个角色开口说了一声“Yeah”。作者就不自觉地成了哈梅特的模仿者了。
但是仍旧有不少人认为，哈梅特写的根本不是侦探小说，他写的只不过是穷街陋巷的赤裸裸纪事，随便放进一些疑案的成分，就象在马提尼鸡尾酒中放一枚棷榄一样。这种人是些大惊小怪的老太太——应该说两种性别都有，或者说根本没有性别，而且几乎平各种年纪都有——她们喜欢谋杀案带有郁金香花的香味，不喜欢有人提醒她们，谋杀是一件无限残忍的事，即使凶手有时候看上去象个花花公子，或者大学教授，或者头发花白、和蔼慈祥的老太太。
也有少数一些拥护正规的或典型的疑案小说的人给吓怕了，他们认为要是小说中没有提出一个正式严格的难题，环绕着它布置好贴有整齐标签的线索，那就谈不上是部侦探小说。例如他们会指出，在读《马耳他之鹰》时，没有人会关心到底是谁杀了斯贝的合伙人阿却（这是这个故事中唯一正规的难题），因为读者一直在忙着想别的事情。但是在《玻璃钥匙》中，读者不断被提醒，到底是谁杀了泰勒·亨利，所得的效果完全相同；这种效果是一种充满动作、计谋、矛盾的目的和逐步突出人物性格的效果，反正侦探小说要写的也就此而已。其余都是客厅里练耐心的游戏。
但是在我看来，这一切（加上哈梅特）还很不够。写谋杀小说的现实主义作家所写的世界中，歹徒可能统治国家，甚至城市。在那里，旅馆公寓、有名的酒楼餐厅的主人是靠开妓院发财的，电影明星可能是盗匪的眼线，大厅里那个彬彬有礼的人可能是彩票老板。在这个世界里，法官藏有一地窖的私酒，却可能因一个人口袋里有一瓶酒而送他进监牢；你家乡的市长可能为了到手钱财而对谋杀案眼开眼闭；入夜之后无人敢在街上行走，因为法律和治安是句空话，从来没有实行过。在这个世界里，你很可能在光天化日之下见到有人沿路拦劫，明明看清楚是谁在作案，但是你马上躲开，混到人群中去，不愿出来告发，因为拦劫的人可能有朋友为他报复，或者警方可能不喜欢你出庭作证，不管怎样，为被告辩护的恶讼师可以在法庭上对你百般侮辱，因为陪审团里都是他们挑选的低能儿。有党派背景的法官除了敷衍一下外不会加以干涉。
这个世界可不是一个香气扑鼻的世界，却是你生活其间的世界。有些心肠狠硬，冷眼旁观的作家就能够从中找到非常有趣，甚至有意思的材料。一个人遭到了杀害并没有什么意思，有意思的是杀他不是为了什么了不起的原因，他的死是我们社会文明的印记。所有这一切，仍旧还不晚。
凡是可以称为艺术的东西，其中都有补救赎罪的因素。如果这是高度悲剧的话，则可能是纯粹的悲剧。也可能是怜悯和讽刺，也可能是强人的粗声大笑。但是总得有个人到这些穷街陋巷里去，一个自己并不卑鄙，也无污点或者胆怯的人。这种故事里的侦探必须是这样的一个人。他是英雄，他是一切。他必须是个完全的人，普通的人，但是一个不平常的人。用一句陈词滥调，他必须是个讲声誉的人，凭本能出发，从必然出发，不假思索，更不用说出口了。他必须是他的世界中最优秀的人，对其他世界来说也是够好的。我对他的私生活并不怎么在意，他既不是个阉人，也不是个圣人；我想他可能会诱奸一个公爵夫人，但是我敢说他不会糟蹋一个处女。他只要在某个方面是讲声誉的人，那么在其他所有方面也是个讲声誉的人。
他相对来说是个穷人，否则他就不会当侦探了。他是个普通人，否则他就不可能走到普通人中间去。他爱惜自己的名誉，否则他就不知道自己干的是什么工作。他不会无故受人钱财，也不会受了侮辱而不予应有的报复。他是个孤独的人，他有自尊心，你必须待之以礼，否则下次见到他时就后悔莫及。他说话同他同时代的人一样，那就是出语辛辣诙谐，富有幽默感，厌恶弄虚作假，蔑视卑鄙小气。故事就是这个人寻找隐藏的真相面作的冒险，如果不是发生在这个擅于冒险的人身上，则也不成其为冒险了。他的知识之广令你吃惊，但这是理应属于他的，因为这属于他所生活的世界。如果有足够的象他那样的人在，我想这个世界就会是一个可以过太平日子的地方，但是又不免过于沉闷单调，不值得在那里过日子了。
Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic. Old-fashioned novels which now seem stilted and artificial to the point of burlesque did not appear that way to the people who first read them. Writers like Fielding and Smollett could seem realistic in the modern sense because they dealt largely with uninhibited characters, many of whom were about two jumps ahead of the police, but Jane Austen’s chronicles of highly inhibited people against a background of rural gentility seem real enough psychologically. There is plenty of that kind of social and emotional hypocrisy around today. Add to it a liberal dose of intellectual pretentiousness and you get the tone of the book page in your daily paper and the earnest and fatuous atmosphere breathed by discussion groups in little clubs. These are the people who make bestsellers, which are promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob-appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering culture. Just get a little behind in your payments and you will find out how idealistic they are.
The detective story for a variety of reasons can seldom be promoted. It is usually about murder and hence lacks the element of uplift. Murder, which is a frustration of the individual and hence a frustration of the race, may have, and in fact has, a good deal of sociological implication. But it has been going on too long for it to be news. If the mystery novel is at all realistic (which it very seldom is) it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise nobody but a psychopath would want to write it or read it. The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway. The detection of quality in writing is difficult enough even for those who make a career of the job, without paying too much attention to the matter of advance sales.
The detective story (perhaps I had better call it that, since the English formula still dominates the trade) has to find its public by a slow process of distillation. That it does do this, and holds on thereafter with such tenacity, is a fact; the reasons for it are a study for more patient minds than mine. Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.
Yet the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels. Rather second-rate items outlast most of the high velocity fiction, and a great many that should never have been born simply refuse to die at all. They are as durable as the statues in public parks and just about that dull. This is very annoying to people of what is called discernment. They do not like it that penetrating and important works of fiction of a few years back stand on their special shelf in the library marked "Best-Sellers of Yesteryear," and nobody goes near them but an occasional shortsighted customer who bends down, peers briefly and hurries away; while old ladies jostle each other at the mystery shelf to grab off some item of the same vintage with a title like The Triple Petunia Murder Case, or Inspector Pinchbottle to the Rescue. They do not like it that "really important books" get dusty on the reprint counter, while Death Wears Yellow Garters is put out in editions of fifty or one hundred thousand copies on the news-stands of the country, and is obviously not there just to say goodbye.
To tell you the truth, I do not like it very much myself. In my less stilted moments I too write detective stories, and all this immortality makes just a little too much competition. Even Einstein couldn’t get very far if three hundred treatises of the higher physics were published every year, and several thousand others in some form or other were hanging around in excellent condition, and being read too. Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer (there must after all be a few) competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well. And on almost equal terms; for it is one of the qualities of this kind of writing that the thing that makes people read it never goes out of style. The hero’s tie may be a little off the mode and the good gray inspector may arrive in a dogcart instead of a streamlined sedan with siren screaming, but what he does when he gets there is the same old futzing around with timetables and bits of charred paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering arbutus under the library window.
I have, however, a less sordid interest in the matter. It seems to me that production of detective stories on so large a scale, and by writers whose immediate reward is small and whose need of critical praise is almost nil, would not be possible at all if the job took any talent. In that sense the raised eyebrow of the critic and the shoddy merchandizing of the publisher are perfectly logical. The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average—or only slightly above average—detective story does. Not only is it published but it is sold in small quantities to rental libraries, and it is read. There are even a few optimists who buy it at the full retail price of two dollars, because it looks so fresh and new, and there is a picture of a corpse on the cover. And the strange thing is that this average, more than middling dull, pooped-out piece of utterly unreal and mechanical fiction is not terribly different from what are called the masterpieces of the art. It drags on a little more slowly, the dialogue is a little grayer, the cardboard out of which the characters are cut is a shade thinner, and the cheating is a little more obvious; but it is the same kind of book. Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way. There are reasons for this too, and reasons for the reasons; there always are.
I suppose the principal dilemma of the traditional or classic or straight-deductive or logic—and—deduction novel of detection is that for any approach to perfection it demands a combination of qualities not found in the same mind. The cool-headed constructionist does not also come across with lively characters, sharp dialogue, a sense of pace and an acute use of observed detail. The grim logician has as much atmosphere as a drawing-board. The scientific sleuth has a nice new shiny laboratory, but I’m sorry I can’t remember the face. The fellow who can write you a vivid and colorful prose simply won’t be bothered with the coolie labor of breaking down unbreakable alibis. The master of rare knowledge is living psychologically in the age of the hoop skirt. If you know all you should know about ceramics and Egyptian needlework, you don’t know anything at all about the police. If you know that platinum won’t melt under about 2800 degrees F. by itself, but will melt at the glance of a pair of deep blue eyes when put close to a bar of lead, then you don’t know how men make love in the twentieth century. And if you know enough about the elegant flânerie of the pre-war French Riviera to lay your story in that locale, you don’t know that a couple of capsules of barbital small enough to be swallowed will not only not kill a man—they will not even put him to sleep, if he fights against them.
Every detective story writer makes mistakes, and none will ever know as much as he should. Conan Doyle made mistakes which completely invalidated some of his stories, but he was a pioneer, and Sherlock Holmes after all is mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue. It is the ladies and gentlemen of what Mr. Howard Haycraft (in his book Murder for Pleasure) calls the Golden Age of detective fiction that really get me down. This age is not remote. For Mr. Haycraft’s purpose it starts after the first World War and lasts up to about 1930. For all practical purposes it is still here. Two-thirds or three-quarters of all the detective stories published still adhere to the formula the giants of this era created, perfected, polished and sold to the world as problems in logic and deduction. These are stern words, but be not alarmed. They are only words. Let us glance at one of the glories of the literature, an acknowledged masterpiece of the art of fooling the reader without cheating him. It is called The Red House Mystery, was written by A. A. Milne, and has been named by Alexander Woollcott (rather a fast man with a superlative) "one of the three best mystery stories of all time." Words of that size are not spoken lightly. The book was published in 1922, but is quite timeless, and might as easily have been published in July 1939, or, with a few slight changes, last week. It ran thirteen editions and seems to have been in print, in the original format, for about sixteen years. That happens to few books of any kind. It is an agreeable book, light, amusing in the Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not as easy as it looks.
It concerns Mark Ablett’s impersonation of his brother Robert, as a hoax on his friends. Mark is the owner of the Red House, a typical laburnum-and-lodge-gate English country house, and he has a secretary who encourages him and abets him in this impersonation, because the secretary is going to murder him, if he pulls it off. Nobody around the Red House has ever seen Robert, fifteen years absent in Australia, known to them by repute as a no-good. A letter from Robert is talked about, but never shown. It announces his arrival, and Mark hints it will not be a pleasant occasion. One afternoon, then, the supposed Robert arrives, identifies himself to a couple of servants, is shown into the study, and Mark (according to testimony at the inquest) goes in after him. Robert is then found dead on the floor with a bullet hole in his face, and of course Mark has vanished into thin air. Arrive the police, suspect Mark must be the murderer, remove the debris and proceed with the investigation, and in due course, with the inquest.
Milne is aware of one very difficult hurdle and tries as well as he can to get over it. Since the secretary is going to murder Mark once he has established himself as Robert, the impersonation has to continue on and fool the police. Since, also, everybody around the Red House knows Mark intimately, disguise is necessary. This is achieved by shaving off Mark’s beard, roughening his hands ("not the hands of a manicured gentlemen"—testimony) and the use of a gruff voice and rough manner. But this is not enough. The cops are going to have the body and the clothes on it and whatever is in the pockets. Therefore none of this must suggest Mark. Milne therefore works like a switch engine to put over the motivation that Mark is a thoroughly conceited performer that he dresses the part down to the socks and underwear (from all of which the secretary has removed the maker’s labels), like a ham blacking himself all over to play Othello. If the reader will buy this (and the sales record shows he must have) Milne figures he is solid. Yet, however light in texture the story may be, it is offered as a problem of logic and deduction. If it is not that, it is nothing at all. There is nothing else for it to be. If the situation is false, you cannot even accept it as a light novel, for there is no story for the light novel to be about. If the problem does not contain the elements of truth and plausibility, it is no problem; if the logic is an illusion, there is nothing to deduce. If the impersonation is impossible once the reader is told the conditions it must fulfill, then the whole thing is a fraud. Not a deliberate fraud, because Milne would not have written the story if he had known what he was up against. He is up against a number of deadly things, none of which he even considers. Nor, apparently, does the casual reader, who wants to like the story, hence takes it at its face value. But the reader is not called upon to know the facts of life; it is the author who is the expert in the case. Here is what this author ignores:
1. The coroner holds formal jury inquest on a body for which no competent legal identification is offered. A coroner, usually in a big city, will sometimes hold inquest on a body that cannot be identified, if the record of such an inquest has or may have a value (fire, disaster, evidence of murder, etc.). No such reason exists here, and there is no one to identify the body. A couple of witnesses said the man said he was Robert Ablett. This is mere presumption, and has weight only if nothing conflicts with it. Identification is a condition precedent to an inquest. Even in death a man has a right to his won identity. The coroner will, wherever humanly possible, enforce that right. To neglect it would be a violation of his office.
2. Since Mark Ablett, missing and suspected of murder, cannot defend himself, all evidence of his movements before and after the murder is vital (as also whether he has money to run away on); yet all such evidence is given by the man closest to the murder, and is without corroboration. It is automatically suspect until proved true.
3. The police find by direct investigation that Robert Ablett was not well thought of in his native village. Somebody there must have known him. No such person was brought to the inquest. (The story couldn’t stand it.)
4. The police know there is an element of threat in Robert’s supposed visit, and that it is connected with the murder must be obvious to them. Yet they make no attempt to check Robert in Australia, or find out what character he had there, or what associates, or even if he actually came to England, and with whom. (If they had, they would have found out he had been dead three years.)
5. The police surgeon examines the body with a recently shaved beard (exposing unweathered skin), artificially roughened hands, yet the body of a wealthy, soft-living man, long resident in a cool climate. Robert was a rough individual and had lived fifteen years in Australia. That is the surgeon’s information. It is impossible he would have noticed nothing to conflict with it.
6. The clothes are nameless, empty, and have had the labels removed. Yet the man wearing them asserted an identity. The presumption that he was not what he said he was is overpowering. Nothing whatever is done about this peculiar circumstance. It is never even mentioned as being peculiar.
7. A man is missing, a well-known local man, and a body in the morgue closely resembles him. It is impossible that the police should not at once eliminate the chance that the missing man is the dead man. Nothing would be easier than to prove it. Not even to think of it is incredible. It makes idiots of the police, so that a brash amateur may startle the world with a fake solution.
The detective in the case is an insouciant gent named Antony Gillingham, a nice lad with a cheery eye, a cozy little flat in London, and that airy manner. He is not making any money on the assignment, but is always available when the local gendarmerie loses its notebook. The English police seem to endure him with their customary stoicism; but I shudder to think of what the boys down at the Homicide Bureau in my city would do to him.
There are less plausible examples of the art than this. In Trent’s Last Case (often called "the perfect detective story") you have to accept the premise that a giant of international finance, whose lightest frown makes Wall Street quiver like a chihuahua, will plot his own death so as to hang his secretary, and that the secretary when pinched will maintain an aristocratic silence; the old Etonian in him maybe. I have known relatively few international financiers, but I rather think the author of this novel has (if possible) known fewer. There is one by Freeman Wills Crofts (the soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy) wherein a murderer by the aid of makeup, split second timing, and some very sweet evasive action, impersonates the man he has just killed and thereby gets him alive and distant from the place of the crime. There is one of Dorothy Sayers’ in which a man is murdered alone at night in his house by a mechanically released weight which works because he always turns the radio on at just such a moment, always stands in just such a position in front of it, and always bends over just so far. A couple of inches either way and the customers would get a rain check. This is what is vulgarly known as having God sit in your lap; a murderer who needs that much help from Providence must be in the wrong business. And there is a scheme of Agatha Christie’s featuring M. Hercule Poirot, that ingenius Belgian who talks in a literal translation of school-boy French, wherein, by duly messing around with his "little gray cells," M. Poirot decides that nobody on a certain through sleeper could have done the murder alone, therefore everybody did it together, breaking the process down into a series of simple operations, like assembling an egg-beater. This is the type that is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a halfwit could guess it.
There are much better plots by these same writers and by others of their school. There may be one somewhere that would really stand up under close scrutiny. It would be fun to read it, even if I did have to go back to page 47 and refresh my memory about exactly what time the second gardener potted the prize-winning tea-rose begonia. There is nothing new about these stories and nothing old. The ones I mentioned are all English only because the authorities (such as they are) seem to feel the English writers had an edge in this dreary routine, and that the Americans, (even the creator of Philo Vance–probably the most asinine character in detective fiction) only made the Junior Varsity.
This, the classic detective story, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It is the story you will find almost any week in the big shiny magazines, handsomely illustrated, and paying due deference to virginal love and the right kind of luxury goods. Perhaps the tempo has become a trifle faster, and the dialogue a little more glib. There are more frozen daiquiris and stingers ordered, and fewer glasses of crusty old port; more clothes by Vogue, and décors by the House Beautiful, more chic, but not more truth. We spend more time in Miami hotels and Cape Cod summer colonies and go not so often down by the old gray sundial in the Elizabethan garden. But fundamentally it is the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests; the same ingenue in fur-trimmed pajamas screaming in the night to make the company pop in and out of doors and ball up the timetable; the same moody silence next day as they sit around sipping Singapore slings and sneering at each other, while the flat-feet crawl to and fro under the Persian rugs, with their derby hats on.
Personally I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle, and the people as a rule, just wear clothes and drink drinks. There is more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really existed all around and not just the part the camera sees; there are more long walks over the Downs and the characters don’t all try to behave as if they had just been tested by MGM. The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
There is a very simple statement to be made about all these stories: they do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. They try to be honest, but honesty is an art. The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn’t know what to be honest about. He thinks a complicated murder scheme which baffles the lazy reader, who won’t be bothered itemizing the details, will also baffle the police, whose business is with details. The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off. But if the writers of this fiction wrote about the kind of murders that happen, they would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it is lived. And since they cannot do that, they pretend that what they do is what should be done. Which is begging the question–and the best of them know it.
In her introduction to the first Omnibus of Crime, Dorothy Sayers wrote: "It (the detective story) does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement." And she suggested somewhere else that this is because it is a "literature of escape" and not "a literature of expression." I do not know what the loftiest level of literary achievement is: neither did Aeschylus or Shakespeare; neither does Miss Sayers. Other things being equal, which they never are, a more powerful theme will provoke a more powerful performance. Yet some very dull books have been written about God, and some very fine ones about how to make a living and stay fairly honest. It is always a matter of who writes the stuff, and what he has in him to write it with. As for literature of expression and literature of escape, this is critics’ jargon, a use of abstract words as if they had absolute meanings. Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings. It is one of the things that distinguish them from the three-toed sloth; he apparently–one can never be quite sure–is perfectly content hanging upside down on a branch, and not even reading Walter Lippmann. I hold no particular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.
I do not think such considerations moved Miss Dorothy Sayers to her essay in critical futility.
I think what was really gnawing at her mind was the slow realization that her kind of detective story was an arid formula which could not even satisfy its own implications. It was second-grade literature because it was not about the things that could make first-grade literature. If it started out to be about real people (and she could write about them–her minor nor characters show that), they must very soon do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot. When they did unreal things, they ceased to be real themselves. They became puppets and cardboard lovers and papier mâché villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility. The only kind of writer who could be happy with these properties was the one who did not know what reality was. Dorothy Sayers’ own stories show that she was annoyed by this triteness; the weakest element in them is the part that makes them detective stories, the strongest the part which could be removed without touching the "problem of logic and deduction." Yet she could not or would not give her characters their heads and let them make their own mystery. It took a much simpler and more direct mind than hers to do that.
In the Long Week-End, which is a drastically competent account of English life and manners in the decade following the first World War, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge gave some attention to the detective story. They were just as traditionally English as the ornaments of the Golden Age, and they wrote of the time in which these writers were almost as well-known as any writers in the world. Their books in one form or another sold into the millions, and in a dozen languages. These were the people who fixed the form and established the rules and founded the famous Detection Club, which is a Parnassus of English writers of mystery. Its roster includes practically every important writer of detective fiction since Conan Doyle. But Graves and Hodge decided that during this whole period only one first-class writer had written detective stories at all. An American, Dashiell Hammett. Traditional or not, Graves and Hodge were not fuddy-duddy connoisseurs of the second rate; they could see what went on in the world and that the detective story of their time didn’t; and they were aware that writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.
How original a writer Hammett really was, it isn’t easy to decide now, even if it mattered. He was one of a group, the only one who achieved critical recognition, but not the only one who wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction. All literary movements are like this; some one individual is picked out to represent the whole movement; he is usually the culmination of the movement. Hammett was the ace performer, but there is nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and short stories of Hemingway. Yet for all I know, Hemingway may have learned something from Hammett, as well as from writers like Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and himself. A rather revolutionary debunking of both the language and material of fiction had been going on for some time. It probably started in poetry; almost everything does. You can take it clear back to Walt Whitman, if you like. But Hammett applied it to the detective story, and this, because of its heavy crust of English gentility and American pseudo- gentility, was pretty hard to get moving. I doubt that Hammett had any deliberate artistic aims whatever; he was trying to make a living by writing something he had first hand information about. He made some of it up; all writers do; but it had a basis in fact; it was made up out of real things. The only reality the English detection writers knew was the conversational accent of Surbiton and Bognor Regis. If they wrote about dukes and Venetian vases, they knew no more about them out of their own experience than the well-heeled Hollywood character knows about the French Modernists that hang in his Bel-Air château or the semi-antique Chippendale-cum-cobbler’s bench that he uses for a coffee table. Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing. He wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.
Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. They thought they were getting a good meaty melodrama written in the kind of lingo they imagined they spoke themselves. It was, in a sense, but it was much more. All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech. Hammett’s style at its worst was almost as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American language (and not even exclusively that any more), can say things he did not know how to say or feel the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill. He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.
With all this he did not wreck the formal detective story. Nobody can; production demands a form that can be produced. Realism takes too much talent, too much knowledge, too much awareness. Hammett may have loosened it up a little here, and sharpened it a little there. Certainly all but the stupidest and most meretricious writers are more conscious of their artificiality than they used to be. And he demonstrated that the detective story can be important writing. The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius, but an art which is capable of it is not "by hypothesis" incapable of anything. Once a detective story can be as good as this, only the pedants will deny that it could be even better. Hammett did something else, he made the detective story fun to write, not an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues. Without him there might not have been a regional mystery as clever as Percival Wilde’s Inquest, or an ironic study as able as Raymond Postgate’s Verdict of Twelve, or a savage piece of intellectual double-talk like Kenneth Fearing’s The Dagger of the Mind, or a tragi-comic idealization of the murderer as in Donald Henderson’s Mr. Bowling Buys a Newspaper, or even a gay and intriguing Hollywoodian gambol like Richard Sale’s Lazarus No. 7.
The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows how to say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit, edge-of-the-chair writing can be as boring as flat writing; dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind than to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes. There has been so much of this sort of thing that if a character in a detective story says, "Yeah," the author is automatically a Hammett imitator.
And there arc still quite a few people around who say that Hammett did not write detective stories at all, merely hardboiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini. These are the flustered old ladies–of both sexes (or no sex) and almost all ages–who like their murders scented with magnolia blossoms and do not care to be reminded that murder is an act of infinite cruelty, even if the perpetrators sometimes look like playboys or college professors or nice motherly women with softly graying hair. There are also a few badly-scared champions of the formal or the classic mystery who think no story is a detective story which does not pose a formal and exact problem and arrange the clues around it with neat labels on them. Such would point out, for example, that in reading TheMaltese Falcon no one concerns himself with who killed Spade’s partner, Archer (which is the only formal proble
But all this (and Hammett too) is for me not quite enough. The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.
It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.
If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.
