LITMIR.BIZ

       INTRODUCTION

      A LITTLE more than four decades ago, in the dear, dead year of 1910, when world wars were still unknown and the Edwardian age was dying with its king, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a journalist on the staff of London’s Daily News, surveyed the state of the detective story and found it foul. But perhaps foul is too strong a word to use in connection with a polite man and a polite era; perhaps it would be better to say, simply, that Bentley found the state of the detective story unsatisfactory. He was not alone. As early as 1905 a contributor to the Academy had declared that ‘the detective in literature’ was ‘passing into decay’ and was carrying ‘with him the regret of a civilized world’.

      Conan Doyle, the old master, was still very much alive as a man, with twenty years to go; but, although he was to produce three more volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories, he was pretty well done as a writer, and his imitators, who came swarming into print after 1891, had proved themselves far better able to copy the master’s faults than to match his virtues. Hence E. C. Bentley’s disgust. Hence his determination to do something about it.

      Others, indeed, were already doing something in their several ways. R. Austin Freeman’s detective, Dr John Thorndyke, making his debut in The Red Thumb Mark (1907), had introduced genuinely scientific methods of detection into fiction. Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner had already taken his seat in the ABC tea shop and begun to unravel crimes while his fingers knotted and untied a piece of string. One of the Sûreté’s most famous sleuths, Monsieur Hanaud, creation of A. E. W. Mason, was just beginning his career. And Bentley’s dear friend, Gilbert K. Chesterton, had already started Father Brown on his amazing, fantastic journeys of detection, in which improbably brilliant guesses were destined repeatedly to cut straight to the core of quite impossible mysteries.

      But Bentley had ideas of his own. He wished to write a full-length detective novel in which the protagonist would be ‘recognizable as a human being’. He wished also to get away from the solemnity that would have made Holmes himself insufferable, had it not

Скачать книгу