THE GUILTY VICARAG~I

\

\\\

Notes on the Detective Story,. by an Ad"

"v. H. AUDEN

A Confession

FOR ME, as for many others, the read-ing of detective stories is an addictionlike tobacco or alcohol. The symp-toms of this are: Firstly, the intensity ofthe craving-if I have any work to do, Imust be careful not to get hold of a detec-tive story for, once I begin one, I cannotwork or sleep till I have finished it. Sec-ondly, its specificity-the story must con-form to certain formulas (I find it verydif-ficult, for example, to read one that is notset in rural England). And, thirdly, itsimmediacy. I forget the story as soon as Ihave finished it, and have no wish to readit again. If, as sometimes happens, I startreading one and find after a few pages thatI have read it before, I cannot go on.

Such reactions convince me that, in mycase at least, detective stories have noth-ing to do with works of art. It is possible,however, that an analysis of the detectivestory, i.e., of the kind of detective story Ienjoy, may throw light, not only on itsmagical function, but also, by contrast, onthe function of art.

Definition

THE vulgar definition, "a Whodunit,"is correct. The basic formula is this:a murder occurs; many are sus-

pected; all but one suspect, who is the mur-derer, are eliminated; the murderer is ar-rested or dies.

This definition excludes:(1) studies of murderers whose guilt is

known, e.g., Malice Aforethought. Thereare borderline cases in which the mur-derer is known and there are no false sus-pects, but the proof is lacking, e.g., manyof the stories of Freeman Wills Crofts.Most of these are permissible.

(2) thrillers, spy stories, stories of mas-ter crooks, etc., when the identification ofthe criminal is subordinate to the defeatof his criminal designs.

The interest in the thriller is the ethicaland eristic conflict between good and evil,between Us and Them. The interest in thestudy of a murderer is the observation, bythe innocent many, of the sufferings of theguilty one. The interest in the detectivestory is the dialectic of innocence andguilt.

As. in the Aristotelian description oftragedy, there is Concealment (the inno-cent seem guilty and the guilty seem in-nocent) and Manifestation (the real guilt isbrought to consciousness). There is alsoperipeteia, in this case not a reversal offortune but a double reversal from ap-parent guilt to innocence and from ap-parent innocence to guilt. The formulamay be diagrammed as follows ..

W. H. Auden, whom Jacques Bar run described last Septemberas "the greatest living poet in English," enjoys readingfor relaxation and here explains the nature of his malady.

\II

\

\ \I \ \\ \

II \ \\ !

I \ \

THE GUILTY VICARAGE 407

Peaceful state beforemurder

IMurder

IFalse clues, secondary

murder, etc.I

SolutionI

Arrest of murdererI

Peaceful state afterarrest

False innocenceI

Revelation of presenceof guilt

IFalse location

of guiltI

Location of real guiltI

CatharsisI

True innocence

In Greek tragedy the audience knowsthe truth; the actors do not, but discoveror bring to pass the inevitable. In modern,e.g., Elizabethan, tragedy the audienceknows neither less nor more than themost knowing of the actors. In the detec-tive story the audience does not know thetruth at all; one of the actors-the mur-derer-does; and the detective, of his ownfree will, discovers and reveals what themurderer, of his own free will, tries to con-ceal.

Greek tragedy and the detective storyhave one characteristic in common, inwhich they both differ from modern trag-edy, namely, the characters are notchanged 'in or by their actions: in Greektragedy because their actions are fated, inthe detective story because the decisiveevent, the murder, has already occurred.Time and space therefore are simply thewhen and where of revealing either whathas to happen or what has actually hap-pened. In consequence, the· detectivestory probably should, and usually does,obey the classical unities, whereas moderntragedy in which the characters developwith time can only do so by a technicaltour de force; and the thriller, like thepicaresque novel, even demands frequentchanges of time and place.

Why Murder?

THERE are three classes of crime:(a) offenses against God and one'sneighbor or neighbors; (b) offensesagainst God and society; (c) offensesagainst God. (All crimes, of course, areoffenses against oneself.)

Murder is a member and the onlymember of Class B. The character com-mon to all crimes in Class' A- is that it is

possible, at least theoretically, either thatrestitution can be made to the injuredparty (e.g., stolen goods can be returned),or that the injured party can forgive thecriminal (e.g., in the case of rape). Conse-quently, society as a whole is only in-directly involved; directly, its representa-tives (the police, etc.) act in the interestsof the injured party.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes theparty it injures, so that society has to takethe place of the victim and on his behalfdemand restitution or grant forgiveness;it is the one crime in which society has adirect interest.

Many detective stories begin with adeath that appears to be suicide and islater discovered to have been murder.Suicide is a crime belonging to Class Cin which neither the criminal's neighborsnor society has any interest, direct or in-direct. As long as a death is believed tobe suicide, even private curiosity is im-proper; as soon as it is proved to be mur-der, public inquiry becomes a duty.

T'HE detective story has five elements-the milieu, the victim, the mur-. derer, the suspects, the detectives.The Milieu (Human)

The detective story requires:(1) A closed society so that the pos-

sibility of an outside murderer (and henceof the society being totally innocent) isexcluded; and a closely related society sothat all its members are potentially sus-pect (if. the thriller, which requires anopen society in which any stranger may bea friend or enemy in disguise).

Such conditions are met by: (a) thegroup of blood relatives (the Christmasdinner in the country house); (b) theclosely knit geographical group (the oldworld village); (c) the occupational group(the theatrical company); (d) the groupisolated by the neutral place (the Pullmancar).

In this last type the concealment-mani-festation formula applies not only to themurder but also to the relations betweenthe members of the group who first appearto be strangers to each other, but are laterfound to be related.

(2) It must appear to be an innocent

408 HARPER'S MAGAZINE

society in a state of grace, i.e., a societywhere there is no need of the law, no con-tradiction between the aesthetic individualand the ethical universal, and where mur-der, therefore, is the unheard-of act whichprecipitates a crisis (for it reveals thatsome member has fallen and is no longerin a state of grace). The law becomes areality and for a time all must live in itsshadow, till the fallen one is identified.With his arrest, innocence is restored, andthe law retires forever.

The characters in a detective storyshould, therefore, be eccentric (aesthet-ically interesting individuals) and good(instinctively ethical)-good, that is, eitherin appearance, later shown to be false, orin reality, first concealed by an appear-ance of bad.

I t is a sound instinct that has made somany detective-story writers choose a col-lege as a setting. The ruling passion of theideal professor is the pursuit of knowledgefor its own sake so that he is relatedto other human beings only indirectlythrough their common relation to thetruth; and those passions, like lust andavarice and envy, which relate individualsdirectly and may lead to murder are, inhis case, ideally excluded. If a murder oc-curs in a college, therefore, it is a sign thatsome colleague is not only a bad man butalso a bad professor. Further, as the basicpremise of academic life is that truth isuniversal and to be shared with all, thegnosis of a concrete crime and the gnosisof abstract ideas nicely parallel and parodyeach other.

(The even more ideal contradiction ofa murder in a monastery is excluded bythe fact that monks go regularly to con-fession and, while the murderer might wellnot confess his crime, the suspects who areinnocent of murder but guilty of lessersins cannot be supposed to conceal themwithout making the monastery absurd.Incidentally, is it an accident that thedetective story has flourished most inpredominantly Protestant countries?)

The detective story writer is also wiseto choose a society with an elaborateritual and to describe this in detail. Aritual is a sign of harmony between theaesthetic and the ethical in which bodyand mind, individual will and general

laws, are not in conflict. The murdereruses his knowledge of the ritual to com-mit the crime and can be caught only bysomeone who acquires an equal or su-perior familiarity with it.

The Milieu (Natural)

INTHE detective story, as in its mirrorimage, the Quest for the Grail, maps(the ritual of space) and timetables(the ritual of time) are desirable. Natureshould reflect its human inhabitants, i.e.,it should be the Great Good Place; forthe more Eden-like it is, the greater thecontradiction of murder. The country ispreferable to the town, a well-to-do neigh-borhood (but not too well-to-do-or therewill be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) bet-ter than a slum. The corpse must shock notonly because it is a corpse but also because;even for a corpse, it is shockingly out ofplace, as when a dog makes a mess on adrawing room carpet.

Mr. Raymond Chandler has writtenthat he intends to take the body out of thevicarage garden and give murder back tothose who are good at it. If he wishes towrite detective stories, i.e., stories where thereader's principal interest is to learn whodid it, he could not be more mistaken; forin a society of professional criminals, theonly possible motives for desiring to iden-tify the murderer are blackmail or re-venge, which both apply to' individuals,not to the group as a whole, and canequally well inspire murder. Actually,whatever he may say, I think Mr. Chan-dler is interested in writing, not detectivestories, but serious studies of a criminal'milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and hispowerful but extremely depressing hooksshould be read and judged, not as escapeliterature, but as works of art.

The Victim

THE victim has to try to satisfy two con-tradictory requirements. He has toinvolve everyone in suspicion, whichrequires that he be a bad character; andhe has to make everyone feel guilty, whichrequires that he be a good character. Hecannot be a criminal because he couldthen be dealt with by the law and murder

THE GUILTY VICARAGE

would be unnecessary. (Blackmail is theonly exception.) The more general thetemptation to murder he arouses, thebetter; e.g., the desire for freedom is a bet-ter motive than money alone or sex alone.On the whole, the best victim is the nega-tive Father or Mother Image.

If there is more than one murder, thesubsequent victims should be more in-nocent than the initial victim, i.e., themurderer should start with a real griev-ance and, as a consequence of righting itby illegitimate means, be forced to mur-der against his will where he has no griev-ance but his own guilt.

The Murderer

MURDER is negative creation, andevery murderer is therefore therebel who claims the right to beomnipotent. His pathos is his refusal tosuffer. The problem for the writer is toconceal his demonic pride from the othercharacters and from the reader, since, if aperson has this pride, it tends to appearin everything he says and does. To surprisethe reader when the identity of the mur-derer is revealed, yet at the same time toconvince him that everything he has previ-ously been told about the murderer isconsistent with his being a murderer, is thetest of a good detective story.

As to the murderer's end, of the threealternatives-execution, suicide, and mad-ness--the first is preferable; for if he com-mits suicide he refuses to repent, and if hegoes mad he cannot repent, but if he doesnot repent society cannot forgive. Execu-tion, on the other hand, is the act of atone-ment, by which the murderer is forgivenby society.

(A suggestion for Mr. Chandler: Among agroup of efficient professional killers whomurder for strictly professional reasons,there is one to whom, like Leopold andLoeb, murder is an acte gratuite. Presentlymurders begin to occur which have notbeen commissioned. The group is morallyoutraged and bewildered; it has to call inthe police to detect the amateur murdererand rescue the professionals from a mutualsuspicion which threatens to disrupt theirorganization and to injure their capacityto murder.)

409

The Suspects

THE detective-story society is a societyconsisting of apparently innocent in-dividuals, i.e., their aesthetic in-terest as individuals does not conflict withtheir ethical obligations to the universal.The murder is the act of disruption bywhich innocence is lost, and the individualand the law become opposed to each other.In the case of the murderer this oppositionis completely real (till he is arrested andconsents to be punished); in the case ofthe suspects it is mostly apparent.

But in order for the appearance toexist, there must be some element of re-ality; e.g., it is unsatisfactory if the sus-picion is caused by chance or the mur-derer's malice alone. The suspects must beguilty of something, because, now that theaesthetic and the ethical are in opposition,if they are completely.innocent (obedientto the ethical) they lose their aestheticinterest and the reader will ignore them.

For suspects, the principal causes ofguilt are:

(1) the wish or even the intention tomurder;

(2) crimes of Class A or vices of Class C(e.g., illicit amours) which the suspect isafraid or ashamed to reveal (see WhyMurder?);

(3) a hubris of intellect which tries tosolve the crime itself and despises the of-ficial police (assertion of the supremacyof the aesthetic over the ethical). If greatenough, this hubris leads to its subject get.ting murdered;

(4) a hubris of innocence which refusesto co-operate with the investigation;

(5) a lack offaith in another loved sus-pect, which leads its subject to hide or con-fuse clues.

The Detective

COMPLETELY satisfactory detectivesare extremely rare. Indeed, I onlyknow of three: Sherlock Holmes(Conan Doyle), Inspector French (Free.man Wills Crofts), and Father Brown(Chesterton). '

The job of the detective is to restore thestate of grace in which the aesthetic andthe ethical are as one. Since the murderer

410 HARPER'S MAGAZINE

who caused their disjunction is the aesthet-ically defiant individual, his opponen"the detective, must be either the officialrepresentative of the.ethical or the excep-tional individual who is himself in a stateof grace. If he is the former, he is a pro-fessional; if he is the latter, he is an ama-teur. In either case, the detective must bethe total stranger who cannot possiblybe involved in the crime; this excludes thelocal police and should, I think, excludethe detective who is a friend of one of thesuspects. The professional detective hasthe advantage that, since he is not an in-dividual but a representative of the ethical,he does not need a motive for investigatingthe crime; but for the same reason he hasthe disadvantage of being unable to over-look the minor ethical violations of the sus-pects, and therefore it is harder for himto gain their confidence.

Most amateur detectives, on the otherhand, are failures either because they arepriggish supermen, like Lord Peter Wim-sey and Philo Vance, who have no motivefor being detectives except caprice, or be-cause, like the detectives of the hard-boiledschool, they are motivated by avarice orambition and might just as well be mur-derers.

The amateur detective genius may haveweaknesses to give him aesthetic interest,but they must not be of a kind which out-rage ethics. The most satisfactory weak-nesses are the solitary oral vices of eatingand drinking or childish boasting. Inhis sexual life, the detective must be eithercelibate or happily married.

Between the amateur detective and theprofessional policeman stands the criminallawyer whose telos is, not to discover whois guilty, but to prove that his client isinnocent. His ethical justification is thathuman law is ethically imperfect, i.e., notan absolute manifestation of the universaland divine, and subject to chance aestheticlimitations, e.g., the intelligence or stupid-ity of individual policemen and juries(in consequence ofwhich an innocent manmay sometimes be judged guilty).

To correct this imperfection, the deci-sion is arrived at through an aestheticcombat, i.e., the intellectual gifts of thedefense versus those of the prosecution,just as in earlier days doubtful cases were

solved by physical combat between theaccused and the accuser.

The lawyer-detective (e.g., JoshuaClunk) is never quite satisfactory, there-fore, because his interest in the truth orin all the innocent is subordinate to hisinterest in his client, whom he cannotdesert, even if he should really be theguilty party, without ceasing to be alawyer.

Sherlock Holmes

HOLMEsis the exceptional individualwho is in a state of grace becausehe is a genius in whom scientificcuriosity is raised to the status of a heroicpassion. He is erudite but his knowledge isabsolutely specialized (e.g., his ignoranceof the Copernican system); he is in allmatters outside his field as helpless as achild (e.g., his untidiness), and he paysthe price for his scientific detachment (hisneglect of feeling) by being the victim ofmelancholia which attacks him wheneverhe is unoccupied with a case (e.g., hisviolin playing and cocaine taking).

His motive for being a detective is,positively, a love of the neutral truth (hehas no interest in the feelings of the guiltyor the innocent), and, negatively, a need :to escape from his own feelings of melan-choly. His attitude toward people and histechnique of observation and deductionare those of the chemist or physicist. If hechooses human beings rather than inani-mate matter as his material, it is becauseinvestigating the inanimate is unheroicallyeasy since it cannot tell lies, which humanbeings can and do, so that in dealing withthem, observation must be twice as sharpand logic twice as rigorous.

Inspector French

HISclass and culture are the naturalones for a Scotland Yard inspector.(The old Oxonian Inspector is in-sufferable.) His motive is love of duty.Holmes detects for his own sake and showsthe maximum indifference to all feelingsexcept a negative fear of his own. Frenchdetects for the sake of the innocent mem-bers of society, and is indifferent only tohis own feelings and those of the mur-

THE GUILTY VICARAGE 411

derer. (He would much rather stay athome with his wife.) He is exceptional onlyin his exceptional love of duty whichmakes him take exceptional pains; he doesonly what all could do as well if they hadthe same patient industry (his checking ofalibis for tiny flaws which careless hurryhad missed). He outwits the murderer,partly because the latter is not quite sopainstaking as he, and partly because themurderer must act alone, while he has thehelp of all the innocent people in the worldwho are doing their duty (e.g., the post-men, railway clerks, milkmen, etc., whobecome, accidentally, witnesses to thetruth).

Father Brown

[

E Holmes, an amateur; yet, likeFrench, not an individual genius.His activities as a detective are an

incidental part of his activities as a priestwho cares for souls. His prime motive iscompassion, of which the guilty are ingreater need than the innocent, and he in-vestigates murders, not for his own sake,nor even for the sake of the innocent, butfor the sake of the murderer who can savehis soul if he will confess and repent. Hesolves his cases, not by approaching themobjectively like a scientist or a policeman,but by subjectively imagining himselfto be the murderer, a process which isgood not only for the murderer but forFather Brown himself because, as he says,"it gives a man his remorse beforehand."

Holmes and French can only help themurderer as teachers, i.e., they can teachhim that murder will out and does notpay. More they cannot do since neitheris tempted to murder; Holmes is toogifted, French too well trained in the habitof virtue. Father Brown can go furtherand help the murderer as an example,i.e., as a man who is also tempted to mur-der, but is able by faith to resist tempta-tion.

The Reader

THE most curious fact about the detec-tive story is that it makes its greatestappeal precisely to those classes ofpeople who are most immune to other

forms of daydream literature. The typicaldetective story addict is a doctor or clergy.man or scientist or artist, i.e., a fairly sue-cessful professional man with intellectualinterests and well-read in his own field,who could never stomach the SaturdayEvening Post or True Confessions or moviemagazines or comics. If I ask myself whyI cannot enjoy stories about strong silentmen and lovely girls who make love in abeautiful landscape and come into mil-lions of dollars, I cannot answer that Ihave no phantasies of being handsome andloved and rich, because of course I have(though my life is, perhaps, sufficientlyfortunate to make me less envious in anaive way than some). No, I can only saythat I am too conscious of the absurdityand evil of such wishes to enjoy seeingthem reflected in print.

I can, to some degree, resist yielding tothese or similar desires which tempt me,but I cannot prevent myself from havingthem to resist; and it is the fact that I havethem which makes me feel guilty, so thatinstead of dreaming about indulging mydesires, I dream about the removal of theguilt which I feel at their existence. ThisI still do, and must do, because guilt is asubjective feeling where any further stepis only a reduplication-feeling guiltyabout my guilt. I suspect that the typicalreader of detective stories is, like myself,a person who suffers from a sense of sin.From the point of view of ethics, desiresand acts are good or bad, and I mustchoose the good and reject the bad, butthe I which makes this choice is ethicallyneutral; it only becomes good or bad in itschoice. To have a sense ofsin means to feelguilty at there being an ethical choice tomake, a guilt which, however "good" Imay become, remains unchanged. As St.Paul says: "Except I had known the law,I had not known sin."

ITIS sometimes said that detective storiesare read by respectable law-abidingcitizens in order to gratify in phantasythe violent or murderous wishes they darenot, or are ashamed to, translate intoaction. This may be true for the reader ofthrillers (which I rarely enjoy), but it isquite false for the reader of detectivestories. On the contrary, the magical satis-

412 HARPER'S MAGAZINE

faction the latter provide (which makesthem escape literature not works of art) isthe illusion of being dissociated from themurderer.

The magic formula is an innocencewhich is discovered to contain guilt; thena suspicion of being the guilty one; andfinally a real innocence from which theguilty other has been expelled, a cureeffected, not by me or my neighbors, butby the miraculous intervention of a geniusfrom outside who removes guilt by givingknowledge of guilt. (The detective storysubscribes, in fact, to the Socratic day-dream: "Sin is ignorance.")

If one thinks of a work of art whichdeals with murder, Crime and Punishmentfor example, its effect on the reader is tocompel an identification with the mur-derer which he would prefer not to rec-ognize. The identification of phantasy isalways an attempt to avoid one's own suf-fering: the identification of art is a com-pelled sharing in the suffering of another.Kafka's The Trial is another instructiveexample of the difference between a workof art and the detective story. In the latterit is certain that a crime has been com-mitted and, temporarily, uncertain to

whom the guilt should be attached; as soonas this is known, the innocence of everyoneelse is certain. (Should it turn out thatafter all no crime has been committed,then all would be innocent.) In The Trial,on the other hand, it is the guilt that iscertain and the crime that is uncertain;the aim of the hero's investigation is, notto prove his innocence (which would beimpossible for he knows he is guilty), butto discover what, if anything, he has doneto make himself guilty. K, the hero, is, infact, a portrait of the kind of person whoreads detective stories for escape.

THE phantasy, then, which the detec-tive story addict indulges is thephantasy of being restored. to theGarden of Eden, to a state of innocence,where he may know love as love and notas the law. The driving force behind thisdaydream is the feeling of guilt, the causeof which is unknown to the dreamer. Thephantasy of escape is the same, whetherone explains the guilt in Christian, Freud-ian, or any other terms. One's way of try-ing to face the reality, on the other hand,will, of course, depend very much on one'screed.

Gadaboutown

R. VINZONS ASIS

gadaboutown, lip-trumpet blaringdamns the sins of his rival party:

. wind in his mouth blowing (blowingacross seas of frightened faces) playfully

this world would be better without suchconflict he is brewing for the masses-better to unlearn the half-truthsbetter to unhear the half-lies

better to unsee the judas treebetter to unknow where judas hangbetter to kiss the limb of his treewhere the birds once sang