ABSTRACT
In her 1937 essay “The Literature of Detection,” composed for Oxford University’s student newspaper The Cherwell, Penelope [Knox] Fitzgerald, in the course of reviewing her uncle Father Ronald Knox’s detective novel Double Cross-Purposes, sets out to define the detective story, beginning with the claim that “[i]f a picture is half-way between a thought and a thing, a detective story stands half-way between a book and a soulless aberration” (LD 188). It is not the most exalting point d’appui. Fitzgerald respects the form, yet if “[t]here is no idea of a modern novel” (LD 188), for the reason that its practitioners-James, Conrad, Hemingway, Barnes, Stein, Joyce, Lawrence, Proust, Woolf, etc.—made definition a fraught undertaking, one can, she thinks, feel on safer ground when addressing oneself to the parameters of the detective novel:
The detective novel commands respect in this-that it has a certain standard, a classic conception by which it may measure itself. There is no idea of a modern novel; but the serious detective writer should be conscious of a definite pattern, three hundred pages long (almost exactly) and selling at seven and six; containing not less than one murder and not more than three, with some comic relief, some sentimental passages describing local scenery and either a police detective or an amateur with some credentials for his investigation. (LD 188)
Others requirements, writes Fitzgerald, include “fair play in presenting available clues, whether of character or circumstance” and a penchant for seeing fortunes reversed, entailing “an entire shifting of suspicion, a disruption of the conclusions already reached and a shedding of new light” (LD 188). Evidence for Fitzgerald’s requirements could be found, she suggests, in the gamut of Golden Age detective authors, among whom she mentions Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Milward Kennedy, Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, C. H. Kitchin, and Freeman Wills Crofts. There is also the obligatory bow in the direction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who showed the subsequent generation how the genre was to be done, and from whose height there can only have been a falling off: a “‘boxed’ problem of the length of an average early Sherlock Holmes story allows just the right space for presentations and adornment of the facts, including a measure of false suspicion. Too much space has led modern detective writers into very devious ways-into gloating over food and wine, raptures over moorland scenery, and morasses of unwanted comic relief” (LD 188).
