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.