I love crime fiction. I have the same appetite for it that social media is telling me girls, of a certain vintage, have for listening to serial killer documentaries as they fall asleep.
For a time I put effort into researching why that might be - my love of crime fiction, that is. I learnt much from a study of genre fiction, that genre rather than literary fiction is so successful commercially precisely because it is reassuringly predictable. The hero will win. The lovers will find one another at the end. The villain of the story will get their comeuppance. The crime will be solved.
The narrative arc of genre fiction is a sure path well trodden. It is familiar, reassuringly so. Crime, as a genre, is familiar.
Auden, poet and literary great, also had a love of crime fiction, and went to great lengths to explain that the allure of cosy crime tales set in the great English countryside can be traced back to Eden. Pastoralism. The countryside is our Eden. The crime is committed, as a form of sin. The rooting out of the criminal restores order, a forgiveness of sins and saving of the innocent.
At this point I want to mark the difference between a detective story and a crime story. A detective story focuses on the crime itself. The crime story focuses more on the characters.
For me, the major fault of the detective story is when the clues are not laid before the reader, and instead the detective arrives at the end of the story and announces, ‘Ah, but dear Watson, you forgot to consider that the evidence - which only I have seen - points in fact to the weapon having been concealed in a plant pot that I never brought to your attention’. A ‘gotcha’ moment, but one in which the reader is purposefully rendered isolated from the events. We are looking in, without ever having the opportunity to partake in the logical steps that the detective may take.
Which all reads, I am sure, like a criticism of Sherlock Holmes. Yet, I think it more accurate to appreciate the Sherlock Holmes books as a love letter to rational thought. We, the reader, are left as dumbstruck by Holmes’ logic as Watson, leading us readers to siding with the accomplice and writer of Holmes’ adventures. Arthur Conan Doyle does this purposefully. He creates for us a companion of a normal and agreeable level of intelligence who makes the stories readable. This is never more clear than when Holmes replaces Watson as narrator in The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier and The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane, two works that lack the personal touch of the more representative Watson.
However, it is in the early books that I found the most joy, for I found them purer examples of the crime story, rather than detective, as genre. Watson was feeling Holmes out. Learning his ways. They were becoming friends, and he was winning his trust. Crime happened to bring them together, but if Doyle had played Holmes within a different professional sphere then the coming together of these two characters would still have been a rewarding read.
Which is all a rather roundabout way of saying that I believe the Holmes books are mistakenly categorised as detective fiction. Each story is established with the introduction of a puzzle that takes centre stage, but a strength of Doyles’ writing is the manner in which the vignettes of brotherhood, class, and London society ensure the detectives fatuous methods of crime solving do not rob the reader of all joy.
It is notable, that my own enjoyment of Holmes diminished with the second-half of Doyle’s work, coinciding with the initial death of Holmes in The Final Problem. Was Doyle’s heart no longer in it, his writing influenced more by the financial necessities of publication than literary drive, or was the artful grace of Holmes’ and Watson’s friendly romance simply complete? The real arc of this crime story, that of two men falling instep, complete.
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