tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5516189026477178777.post4473903263907871405..comments2024-03-27T22:32:02.739+01:00Comments on Beneath the Stains of Time: Magnum Opus TomCathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03415176301265218101noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5516189026477178777.post-2697253043948304572017-02-14T19:45:06.993+01:002017-02-14T19:45:06.993+01:00About 1952, W. Somerset Maugham wrote an essay cal...About 1952, W. Somerset Maugham wrote an essay called "The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story." For him, the detective story really meant the British Golden Age style. He saw this as having been superseded by the hard-boiled style. "The story of pure deduction has run to seed. It has been replaced in the public favour by the "hard-boiled" story." He thought highly of Hammett and Chandler. But at the time of his writing he found that even the hard-boiled story had failed due to its excesses. Maugham was a contemporary of these events and I see no reason to doubt his word. Of course, the detective story had not fallen, it had just changed to a type of story he did not like.<br />I have not done a book count, but it appears to me to be plain that by the 1950s the American hard-boiled private eye story was dominant and selling in millions of copies. There were a very few Golden Age holdovers, and some who wrote in their style, but they were selling thousands to the private eye millions. By 1950 virtually all the Golden Age stalwarts had stopped publishing. Freeman, Crofts, Connington, Bailey, Sayers, etc., etc. were all gone or had only a few books left in them. The Golden Age paraphernalia was also gone. Of the three authors you mentioned, all of them began to write in the early 1940s and their subject matter was set. They were estimable writers, but in no way either pioneers or best-sellers. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5516189026477178777.post-61184969120447178832017-02-14T12:40:40.066+01:002017-02-14T12:40:40.066+01:00It's certainly an interesting historical docum...It's certainly an interesting historical document for people interested in the history of both detective stories and the locked room sub-genre. TomCathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03415176301265218101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5516189026477178777.post-33122317812468003342017-02-14T12:39:09.000+01:002017-02-14T12:39:09.000+01:00I'll keep the Dr. Wycherley collection in mind...I'll keep the Dr. Wycherley collection in mind, D! TomCathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03415176301265218101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5516189026477178777.post-75411125735191137142017-02-14T12:38:14.473+01:002017-02-14T12:38:14.473+01:00Sorry for the late response, Anon, but was kind of...Sorry for the late response, Anon, but was kind of busy yesterday. Anyhow...<br /><br />I think 1910 is too late a start for this transitional period, because the detective story went into hibernation during the First World War (1914-1918) and only really awakened during the early 1920s. But I see your point about the 1890s being far too early in the game to be considered a time of transition. <br /><br />So why not settle for the nine years between 1905 and 1914? During those years, the most important writers, who linked the Doylean Era with the Golden Age, appeared on the scene: Jacques Futrelle's <i>The Thinking Machine</i> (1906), R. Austin Freeman's <i>The Red Thumb-Mark</i> (1907), Gaston Leroux's <i>The Mystery of the Yellow Room</i> (1907), G.K. Chesterton's <i>The Innocence of Father Brown</i> (1911) and Arthur Reeve's <i>The Silent Bullet</i> (1912) etc. <br /><br />After this period, the war intervened and not much, if anything, of note was produced, but, when the 1920s rolled around, a new generation of mystery writers were ammassing (e.g. Christie and Sayers) who would go on to define the Golden Age.<br /><br />About the 1940s, I think there was a definite change in the air at the time and new aveanues were being explored, but never really understood why so many people consider it to be end of the road for the Golden Age – when practically every established writer were publishing some of their better work. There were even new writers making their debut whose names are synonymous with the Golden Age, e.g. Christianna Brand, Edmund Crispin and Kelley Roos. <br /><br />You could see the wind was slowly changing during the 1940s, in particular during the post-WWII years, but I always felt that everything attributed to the 40s is more true of the 50s, which I consider to be the waning, twilight years of the genre's golden period. <br />TomCathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03415176301265218101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5516189026477178777.post-33369659315218219852017-02-14T09:55:15.021+01:002017-02-14T09:55:15.021+01:00This sounds like an awesome collection, and amazin...This sounds like an awesome collection, and amazing how it occurred exactly in 'the time between times', acting as an important historical document in itself. Dan @ The Reader is Warnedhttp://thereaderiswarned.wordpress.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5516189026477178777.post-63930149236981822612017-02-14T07:46:18.979+01:002017-02-14T07:46:18.979+01:00I've read the Dr. Wycherley stories and thorou...I've read the Dr. Wycherley stories and thoroughly enjoyed them. <em>The Invisible Bullet</em> looks like a must-buy for me.dfordoomhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02306293859869179118noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5516189026477178777.post-81748744428010043532017-02-13T15:27:06.786+01:002017-02-13T15:27:06.786+01:00This is my theory:
My feeling is that the transiti...This is my theory:<br />My feeling is that the transition from the Doyle type Great Detective to the Golden Age lasted from the period of about 1910 to 1920. Some historians think that Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913), with its more human and fallible detective, marked the start of something new. The fact that Zangwill understood the nature of the fair play mystery as early as 1891 does not mean that it started a new trend or became a dominant mode of production. I think Zangwill just threw the idea into the pot without much followup by other authors because I see little in the way of fair play as a general motif until the Golden Age. It was just a concept fermenting in the general matrix. I think that the dominant mode of production was the Great Detective until about 1910, and then he sort of faded out; people get tired of an idea and the applicable variations get used up. In the period from 1910 to 1920, you see authors casting around for new ideas, such as a lot of scientific detectives like Craig Kennedy, Luther Trant (and Prof. Magnum)and so on. Finally, out of the stew of available ideas, people who read detective stories came up with a new combination of new and old ideas which became a new dominant mode of production, and that was the Golden Age. The defining ideas of the new dominant mode of production could be seen in such things as the rules lists of S.S. Van Dine and Father Knox. They explicitly rejected many of the motifs and clichés of their predecessors, and established the dividing line between the detective story proper and the thriller (the "no Chinamen" rule). And so it went on until the Golden Age type became exhausted in its turn, and a new dominant mode appeared. The hardboiled type appeared at least as early as the early 1920s with Race Williams and the Continental Op, but it did not become the dominant mode until 1947. You can see the waning of the Golden Age type, for instance, in Rufus King. He wrote 11 volumes of Golden Age style stories with Lt. Valcour from 1929 to 1939. Then he dropped Valcour for good, and thereafter he wrote some "women in peril" novels during the 1940s, and largely dropped all the Golden Age apparatus. For some reason the "woman in peril" books seemed to be very popular about this time both in books and the movies. This abandoning of Golden Age style series detectives occurred a lot among younger writers during the 1940s.<br />My use of the word "chaotic" is the meaning given to the word in complex adaptive systems theory.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5516189026477178777.post-22577477064593259882017-02-13T13:17:13.980+01:002017-02-13T13:17:13.980+01:00Oh, yes, you can definitely draw a comparison betw...Oh, yes, you can definitely draw a comparison between the Magnum and Thinking Machine stories. I even mentioned one of them in the review. <br /><br />Speaking of ancient ancestors, you should read "Rhampsinitus and the Thief," which was written down by Herodotus in (circa) 440 BC and is one of the earliest locked room mysteries ever written as well as an inverted crime story. There's also a biblical story, entitled "Bel and the Dragon," concerning an impossible problem with a logical solution. <br /><br />However, I do not believe the repetition of certain themes or formats is necessary due to a lack of originality. Or not entirely. People have always experimented with story-telling, themes and trying to invent new tropes, but the ones that interest and resonate with people tend to stick around. Some of them are pretty universal, such as heroic epics, which is why such tales popup everywhere without being influenced by others. They simply work and people want, or wanted, to read or hear about them. <br /><br />You mentioned the preface of <i>The Big Bow Mystery</i> as a summery of the fair play concept, but those very ideas were put in practice by Conan Doyle in "Silver Blaze," which foreshadowed the Golden Age with it's meticulous clueing – from "<i>the curious incident of the dog in the night-time</i>" to the "<i>singular epidemic among the sheep</i>." I do not believe any other Sherlock Holmes story was as fairly clued as that one. <br /><br />So you can probably mark <i>The Big Bow Mystery</i> (1891) and "Silver Blaze" (1892) as the enthusiastic start of the transitional period that would, eventually, give birth to the Golden Age. But would you describe this process as chaotic? It seems to have been a pretty organic transition, up until World War I, when the genre went into hibernation and awakened in the 1920s as an early, imperfect form of the 1930-and 40s style Golden Age mystery. <br />TomCathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03415176301265218101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5516189026477178777.post-30543238668364044252017-02-13T08:12:45.432+01:002017-02-13T08:12:45.432+01:00Thanks for the review. This one also sounds good a...Thanks for the review. This one also sounds good and I have to pick it up. The stories sound a lot like the somewhat earlier Thinking Machine stories (also available in a great 2-volume edition from Coachwhip).<br />It strikes me how little creativity there is in the human race. I notice that as we start digging we always tend to find a precursor to a story idea we thought was original. It is like the Epic of Gilgamesh: every hero story since then tended to include the same elements, even when it was impossible for there to be any direct influence of Gilgamesh on the later stories. (See Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces.)<br />I think that your point that these stories are transitional between Doyle type stories and Golden Age type stories is important. If we look at cultural transitions between various styles in accordance with complex adaptive systems theory, we tend to find that a particular dominant style has a beginning, a high point and a falling off, after which there is a transitional period as a new dominant style is sought. When the new dominant style finally arrives, it tends to do so all at once, as the system emerges from the chaotic regime. The new dominant style does not emerge from nothing, but rather from a reorganization of new and old elements that were available or emerged during the transitional period. For instance, the idea of the fair play mystery was not original to the Golden Age period; a pretty good summary of it appears in the preface to Zangwill's Big Bow Mystery first published in 1891. What had been a minor element in an earlier period comes to be a dominant element in the next period. We were not to see this sort of transition again until the fading of the Golden Age during the 1940s and the emergence of the hard-boiled mystery of the dominant mode of the mystery novel in the late 1940s. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com