Detective fiction of the 1860s - 1880s needs smart reading and careful handling

(This is a version of a paper I delivered at the VPFA 10th Anniversary Conference in July 2018)

It is almost universally acknowledged that detective fiction is a conservative genre: “detective fiction offered, and indeed still offers, the illusion of security and safety and continuity in what was becoming a disordered, insecure and disturbing world.” (Heather Worthington.  Key Concepts in Crime Fiction, 2011, p xvii). By solving crimes and making the culprit face justice time after time, the genre formula reconfirms the social status quo and prevailing ideas of law and order. Yet the pleasure of reading detective fiction is in the thrill of the chase, the experience of uncertainty, the slow reveal of criminal cunning and coming face to face with homicidal maniacs.

How do we reconcile the moral value of these two halves of the genre formula: the crime and the resolution? We read detective stories because we like the threat to the social order that crime brings, but really we read them because we like the reconfirmation of that social order that comes in the end. Is detective fiction for timid fuddy-duddies who like the mild frisson of dark mysteries and cunning plots by dastardly villains, only to see a crossword-like puzzle neatly solved and their cosy middle-class world order maintained by heroic detectives?

The usual method of academics is to apply the recognised, unquestioned genre formula to a story and see how it fits, i.e. look for signs of Sherlock Holmes-like detection leading to resolutions with public justice in Victorian popular novels (like The Moonstone) and then label them as detective stories. I want to challenge this approach and the view of all detective fiction as an exclusively re-assuring and conservative genre.

We should first recognize that the 1860s, the  high-Victorian decade when detective fiction emerged in the form we recognize it, was a very different time from the 1890s and the lead-up to the First World War, when the modern genre formula solidified into its present shape. We must be much more sensitive to the aspirations and interests of Victorian authors who dabbled with crime and detection in their novels. They may not have been very interested in the puzzle aspect of a detective story at all; they may not have felt the need to bolster the prevailing social order by meeting out justice at the end. Instead, for them, detective story may have served a different purpose.

As Worthington recognizes: “A significant turning point in the evolution of crime fiction was World War I” (xvii) and “Detective fiction with its implicit promise of the preservation of the social status quo, was ideal for this audience.” (Ibid.) I argue that it is inappropriate and misleading to assume that the genre formula of detective fiction and the ideas and ideals embedded in it leading up to and after the Great War can be unquestioningly applied to stories with detection written and published between the 1860s and 1880s. The world changed radically while detective fiction developed. And we must not shoehorn early detective stories into the straitjacket of a later genre formula and assign the same interests, aims and values to stories separated by half a century and a devastating world war.

James Payn was one of the early authors whose stories often included crime, mystery and detection. His Found Dead is a murder mystery and a detective story, published in 1869, the year that separated The Moonstone from Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, two seminal novels for detective fiction. In many ways, Found Dead is a missing link between them.

Payn’s novel opens with a bucolic country scene in Breakneckshire: It is early morning at Mordan Hall in the village of Allgrove. Squire Frank Blissett is “booted and spurred … [he] sniffs the misty air almost like the hounds he burns to follow.” (2). Frank Blisset is a thoroughly good man, “the more you get to know him, the better you like him.” (3) It is quickly established that Squire Blissett has a devoted, invalid wife Lotty and a fairy-like, charming, 16-year-old daughter Christie, and that should anything happen to the Squire, Mordan Hall will go to his debt-laden, morally dubious, artist brother Fred who recently retired from the army in India. Then Squire Blissett rides off to join the local hunt and to meet his death on a lonely stretch of a country track.

Squire Blissett is found by his groom Robert, lying face down with the back of his head bashed in. The second person on the scene is Doctor Fungus, an eccentric doctor with antiquarian interests and Sherlock Holmes’s methods. Doctor Fungus examines the body and the scene and concludes: “Good God! It is as I suspected – there has been some foul play.” (32) The local magistrate tells Dr Fungus: “For God’s sake, don’t pursue this discussion.” (34) Dr Fungus is told to keep quiet about his findings, for the sake of the Squire’s family and for the peace of the community.

At “the close of that same day” (39) the scene moves to London, where a tall, gaunt, “coffee-coloured” (44), “anxious and nervous” (41) man with a comb-over (44) rings the bell of a night refuge. Artist Fred Blissett has come in search of picturesque poverty to model for his painting. Instead he finds Charlie Steen, a handsome young man of 17, “his limbs were shapely and well-grown, exhibiting no sign of protracted want and hardship” (54). Charlie is an orphaned son of an army officer who served in India. Fred offers him a job as an artist’s assistant (57). “Be docile, be obedient, that’s all I ask.” (83) Fred tells Charlie and takes him to his bachelor apartments (62), where in the morning “in a gorgeous dressing-gown … [Charlie] … looked as handsome and delicate a young gentleman as ever captivated a landlady.” (65) When the news of Squire Blissett’s death arrives, Fred sends Charlie to Mordan Hall as his representative (96).

At the inquest for Squire Blissett’s death, the community and particularly its leading member Mr Mellish expect the verdict of accidental death, “unless that little Fungus, who has certainly a maggot in his brain, should make himself obnoxious.” (135) Dr Fungus duly does and, following his evidence for murder, the open verdict of “found dead” is returned (141).

By now Charlie has fallen in love with Christie Blissett and finds himself at home at Mordan Hall. Mrs Blissett does not accept the open verdict: “He was murdered, Sir.”(148) She declares to Charlie “His blood calls from the earth to you, Charlie Steen, and you must see justice done upon his slayer.” (Ibid.) The reward, Mrs Blissett hints, might be Christie’s hand in marriage (154).

There are various, quite clumsy clues of red stains on a suit (73), Fred’s sketch of the location of the murder (158) that he then quickly erases (166), railway timetables (172, 180) and, this is the clincher, an ancient coin known to have been carried by the Squire at the time of his death (14, 213). Through his detective work Charlie discovers that Fred murdered Squire Blissett. We are only halfway through the story.

In the second half of the novel, narrative interest centres on the relationship between Fred and Charlie, the murderer and the detective. The nature of these individual characters, with their past experiences shaping their present reaction, now guides the events. The choices they make shape the story.

Charlie Steen has found a welcoming and supportive community in Allgrove: “For the first time in his life, he was living among friends.” (193). He is offered support to go to Oxford (185-6). Mr Mellish helps him to retrieve a small inheritance (200). He is in love with Christie and buys her a piano (202). Charlie, with his colonial background and orphan status is an outsider longing for a home, but with a debt of gratitude towards Fred who first rescued him from destitution. Charlie pursues Fred as the amateur detective but he also provides an alibi for Fred (222) and later lies to protect him (297).

Fred, who shares Charlie’s Indian connection, is also an outsider exiled from the Allgrove idyll. With his financial worries and artistic lifestyle he is a lonely and restless creature haunting the edges of the Blissett family circle. Fred’s feelings towards Charlie are ambivalent throughout; he offers to support the young man, but also desires to exploit him and his good looks.

Fred’s sanity keeps being questioned (98, 104, 172, 182, 227): “he is touched in upper decks,” (104) “there was always a screw loose in Master Frederick” (128). When his guilt becomes apparent, it becomes the source of his madness: “He has something on his mind which is wearing him to thread, which is hurrying him into the grave.” (227). In Fred Blissett’s, as in Lady Audley’s case, middle-class criminality must be linked to mental illness.

Charlie holds Fred’s fate in his hands. The detective has solved the case, but only the detective and the reader know this. How do you think the tale will end? Charlie and Christie will obviously marry. Fred Blissett clearly has to vanish and remain childless in order for Christie and Charlie to take over Mordan Hall in a happy ending. If this is a sensation novel, Charlie will call Mr Mellish and Doctor Fungus and together they will bundle Fred off to a lunatic asylum (possibly in Belgium). If this is a detective story, Charlie will call in the law and bring Fred to justice. What happens in Found Dead is more disturbing and more radical than either of these scenarios.

Charlie does two things: first he forces a confession from Fred and demands he stays away from Allgrove (309). He also demands that Fred remains single (Ibid.). The impact of this ‘punishment’ are significant for both Charlie and Fred. Secondly, Charlie does what Dr Fungus refused to do: he keeps quiet: “that dread secret … was left a secret to the end.” (323) Charlie marries Christie and becomes the ideal country Squire (324). Charlie keeps the ancient coin that Squire Blissett was carrying when he was murdered. He locks it in a cabinet. Sometimes when he is alone he takes it out to remind himself of the past and, the novel ends, “in that coin lies the secret of his own success in life.” (326) The implications of these understated final words of the novel are jaw-dropping: the detective reaps the reward for murder. For personal gain (to get the girl and the estate) and to avoid scandal, Charlie keeps the murder a secret and forces the reader into complicity. The murder is kept under lock and key in the country house library, to be taken out and contemplated at leisure, just like this novel might be. The social order is not restored to robust health after disruption by crime, instead social order is revealed to be a fiction maintained by the detective and the reader sharing a criminal secret.

It has been suggested that Dickens, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was following Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone in writing a detective story, further developing Collins’s character-based approach, as Collins wrote in his Preface, “to trace the influence of character on circumstances.” But Edwin Drood is much closer in some aspects to Found Dead: John Jasper is a man battling with his own demons, just like Fred Blissett. The narrative interest is not only centred on solving the crime, but on the psychological impact of the crime on the individual. Where Found Dead is much more radical than The Moonstone (we do not know this about Edwin Drood) is in the way it leaves the fictional detective and reader as the only ones who know the truth, and who must keep it a secret to maintain respectability and prosperity.

At the start we asked the question: how can detective fiction be morally subversive and ultra-conservative at the same time? Found Dead suggests that the question is false: the detective genre format did not come about as a short thrill of crime ending in the triumphant re-confirmation of the existing social order. Detective fiction developed as a natural extension of sensation fiction as a genre that questioned the moral foundations of society and explored the moral character of individuals. There is no conservative respectable status quo without a subversive underside of crime. Each is required to define and give substance to the other. They are two sides of the same coin (an ancient coin locked up in a country house cabinet, in this case). James Payn’s 1869 detective story Found Dead shows us, how crime is an essential part of the social order and cannot be excluded from it, and how our heroes, even detective heroes, are driven by selfish impulses as well as noble ones, like all of us.

Spreadsheets of Sensation

James Payn (1830-1898) was a literary workhorse. He was always in love with literature and it took him several attempts at education (he dropped out of a prep school, Eton and The Royal Military Academy at Woolwich) and a period Cambridge University’s various social clubs, before he found his true place at the coal-face of the Victorian publishing industry. According to Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), “He had taken to literature as some people take to drink, simply because he could not help it. It was in his nature.” (Stephen, xlii, “Introduction” to The Backwater Life:, or, Essays of a Literary Veteran, 1899)

Payn’s literary career began with the publication of his poem “The Poet’s Death” in Leighton’s Journal 15^th March, 1851, when Payn was twenty-one years old. A self-published collection Stories from Boccacio and Other Poems followed in 1852. A year later, he got lucky, “Gentleman Cadet,” a story based on his own unhappy experiences at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, was published in Household Words. Payn used his fee for this article to buy a pig for his tutor in Devonshire. The Royal Military Academy protested about their portrayal, and that is how Payn first made a personal acquaintance of Charles Dickens, who took the side of his young contributor. Payn was a great admirer of Dickens, whose praises he would sing at every opportunity. He was also a friend of Wilkie Collins.

Source: Wikipedia

In 1854 Payn married Louisa Adelaide Edlin (born 1830/1) and the young couple moved to Rydal Cottage in Ambleside. There Payn had two literary neighbours Mary Russel Mitford and Harriet Martineau (Martineau Society conference coming up! http://martineausociety.co.uk/2018-annual-meeting-24th-27th-july-dr-williams-library/ ). Through them, Payn met Matthew Arnold, Thomas DeQuincey and other literary greats of the time.

Payn contributed to the Edinburgh-based Chambers Journal and was invited to become its editor in 1858. The Scottish climate did not agree with the Payns and “A Scottish Sabbath was more than he could bear with composure (Stephen, xxviii). The family were glad to follow the journal down to London when it relocated in 1861. According to Stephen, “Year in year out, he was turning out novels and articles, editing and reading for publishers, with admirable punctuality.” (Stephen, xxx) James Payn became part of the London literary scene. In addition to Dickens and Wilkie Collins he knew Thackeray, Trollope and Charles Reade.

Payn’s first novel The Foster Brothers came out in 1859, his last, Another’s Burden in 1897.

His first best-seller was Lost Sir Massingberd: a Romance of Real Life (1864). It is a traditional sensational mystery, where an unpleasant uncle vanishes. The novel was a great success, it was said it brought the circulation of Chambers Journal up by 20,000. In 1874 Payn left Chamber’s Journal and became a reader for the publisher Smith, Elder. A few years later, he produced his second hit novel: By Proxy (1878). It is another sensational tale, set partly in China.

Payn continued to contribute to various magazines, including Westminster Review, Longman’s Magazine, Nineteenth Century and Illustrated London News. In 1883 he became editor of Cornhill Magazine. He made the magazine cheaper in price and its fiction lighter to boost sales. He published Arthur Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard, among others. Payn rejected Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet in 1887 despite writing several stories of detection himself.

According to Stephen, “Novel succeeded novel with exemplary regularity and Payn could reckon a literary output of more than a hundred volumes.” (Stephen, xxxii).  Overall Payn wrote forty-six novels, eight collections of short stories and two memoirs, in addition to his numerous essays. He left Cornhill Magazine in March 1896 due to ill health and in his last years Payn was housebound. He remained happily married all his life, and he left behind his wife Louisa, two sons and five daughters.

It seems that James Pay was an all round good egg. If any of us inspire the kind of memorial essay written by Leslie Stephen about James Payn, we should count ourselves lucky. This essay appears as an introduction to The Backwater of Life: or, Essays of a Literary Veteran, published by Smith, Elder & Co in 1899, as a memorial after Payn’s death. Stephen’s essay tells us pretty much all we need to know about Payn to appreciate his life and his work.(The ODNB entry for Payn seems to have used Stephen as its main source, too.) Several autobiographical essays by Payn were collected in Some Literary Recollections in 1884. Stephen says: “His spontaneous delight in other men’s merits was one of the most obvious and characteristic of his peculiarities.” (Stephen, xxxvii)

Payn is generally known better for his editorial career than his novels. According to Stephen, Payn knew his own limits, and realized he could never aspire to the literary genius of Dickens. He would always remain an admiring acolyte. Stephen insists that there was no hint of envy in James Payn, instead he was always willing to encourage and advice aspiring authors struggling to get published.

Payn is one of the very few Victorian writers, who have left behind their advice on writing popular fiction. Among his many essays, there are two articles, included Backwater of Life (1899), where Payn describes his own methods of writing his novels and offers some do’s and don’t's for novel writing. There are also a few articles on literature included in Some Private Views (1881).

For Payn novel-writing was straight-forward story-telling. First came an initial anecdote to form the tight core for the novel. There was nothing rambling about Payn’s narratives, for Victorian novels they are focused, and clip-clop on with a single story line at a brisk pace. This is the first lesson to take from Payn: have a clear idea of the whole story from the start. Write it down as an anecdote, have the beginning the middle and the end, have the punch line clearly before you, before you start writing.

After this, came the spreadsheet: Payn would take a piece of cardboard and write the names of the main characters at the top of a row of columns. He was meticulous about their backstories and their present circumstances. Once he knew who and what kind of people his story was about, he would then develop the plot by writing in the columns the actions and reactions of the characters. According to Stephen: “The necessary dates and facts would be inserted in the appropriate columns, till a full scheme was drawn out and all points of genealogy and so forth made abundantly clear.” (Stpehen, xxxiv)

This clearly echoes Wilkie Collins’s (1824-1889) approach stated in his Preface to The Moonstone (1868), where Collins declared that he was going to try something new and different: “to trace the influence of character on circumstances.” This is an indication that both authors shared an interest in character development and portrayal of psychology, not just plot and incident. This goes against the perceived formula of Victorian popular fiction, where, so we are told, plot is everything and sensational twists and dramatic incident is piled high.

The characters in Payn’s novels are not psychologically complex or deep, but they are convincing and behave consistently according to their nature. Importantly, Payn recognizes that personalities and human behaviour are shaped by past experiences as well as innate character. In his novels, both nurture and nature are shown to have formed characters whose actions and reactions, in turn, create the twists and turns in the plot.

According to Stephen, in Payn’s novels “Of course there is always a charming girl to fall in love with, and a happy ending such as the unsophisticated reader desiderates.” (Stephen, xxxv) This is true. But I strongly disagree with another observation by Stephen: that Payn “hates his villains with amusing fervour; and instead of bestowing them some touch of human nature, blackens them so thoroughly that they are only fit for starvation in hollow trees, or at the bottom of Cornish mines, or for boiling and immersion in lava streams” (Stephen, xxxv).

Payn by Ape for Vanity Fair, 8 Sept. 1888. Source: Wikipedia

Perhaps Stephen was distracted by Payn’s sense of humour: “His sense of humour may sometimes lead him to take liberties with his reader; he cannot always resist a bit of downright burlesque, and if incident is dramatic he does not inquire too closely into probabilities.” (Stephen, xxxv). The fate of Payn’s villains, including poor Lord Massingberd, is often spectacular and pathetic at the same time.

Payn’s novels express the sheer joy of story-telling: the more outrageous the incident, the more the narrative seems to revel in it. But this should not blind the reader (or Leslie Stephen) to Payn’s efforts to maintain the integrity and internal logic of his characters throughout.

Payn's display of an awareness of the impact of past experience on present actions and the sufficient backstories he provides for his characters, ensure that his villains and, more significantly, his heroes are not black and white. Instead, they make what is so critical for narrative suspense: bad, but understandable choices. In this regard, Payn despite writing trashy Victorian potboilers, displayed an interest in and sensitivity for human character much closer to George Eliot than your average sensation novelist.