Detective Stories

For me, detective stories started probably with a film version of Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, followed by some of her novels, the first I think was Dumb Witness. After reading many of her books, I came across The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which was available in one copy well hidden in the small town library I was a member of. This was a very new experience, since Christie wrote whodunits and until that time I really thought that detective stories are all like that. Later I endevoured to explore the various possibilities there are in detective fiction, and wrote a 10 pages long sort of history of the genre. This was really just a summary, probably very hard to read, and I never intended to add my own experience of the various authors (many of them were not even available for me back then), but rather to provide a view on the variety these stories provide, all the more since variety is something which I find pleasure in regardless of the subject at hand. A year or so ago I extended my essay to a 35 pages long "opus" that reflected the fact that many more authors had become available owing to the widespread use of the internet. And here I am now to add a few more personal details to some of the stories that I have read so far.

Death on the Nile (1978) remains for me one of the most enjoyable films based on a detective story. Ustinov is not as I later realized how Christie described Poirot's appearance, but his delivery has its own charm and I was and am quite content with it. The plot is well adapted to the medium of film, though I should point out that the plot of the film with David Suchet is closer to the book. This was a bit surprising to me as I remember seeing Dumb Witness with Suchet which was quite different from the book, and had the feeling in general that those films allowed for a greater creative freedom in adapting the stories to the screen, while Suchet's Poirot on the other hand is closer to how Christie imagined him. The 1978 film was a star parade in which other than Ustinov also appeared David Niven, Bethe Davis, Maggie Smith, Mia Farrow, Angela Lansbury and George Kennedy to name a few. No doubt it is greatly due to the marvelous cast that I as a very young audience was struck with the power of magic that such plots can be conceived and could actually happen, and a great deal of that magic is still there if I watch the film today. The plot is a very nice whodunit that allows the time for the intricate details to unfold. Interestingly, nowadays many viewers would say they guessed the solution quite early, and I believe it is not because they thought over the evidence and solved the mystery, but because they have time to arrive at the right solution by random guesswork plus the fact that usually they should look for the least suspicious person. This opposite way of cracking the riddle was not so likely in Christie's time when people were new to such "tricks". This is why I believe that although some thrillers today have much simpler plots, they work with a faster timing not leaving enough time for the viewer to guess, or simply apply dramatic shocks rather than purely intellectual diversions. I am not exclusively partial to any solution but one still has to admire the mastery with which Christie built up her plots and at the same time kept them within realistic, if uncommon boundaries. This is what makes her unique among other Golden Age writers e. g. Dickson Carr, who was also a master of puzzles but whose solutions tended to walk on the edge of reality.

Sherlock Holmes, "the extraordinary man" was another great experience I had. The only detective who was and perhaps is believed by some to be a living person. This is often attributed to the skill of his author, Conan Doyle, to create lasting characters. As Conan Doyle explains it (see here) he started off writing those stories to introduce scientific deduction into the until then mostly heuristic solutions of detective fiction that annoyed him greatly; modelling his hero on one of his professors who had great skills in diagnostics. The Holmes stories are indeed more about deduction than about whodunit-like puzzles. They are of the late Victorian tradition of the rainy and misty London, the same word in which Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde or even Jack the Ripper appeared. In this atmosphere Holmes sets out to solve mysteries related by his friend Dr Watson. From the Memoirs I read first I would probably pick Silver Blaze and The Adventure of the Naval Treaty. I think Jeremy Brett's version of Holmes stays the closest to what I imagine the word "eccentric" means in the case of Sherlock Holmes. Here is a scene to support that:

Further early influences on me were the Hard Boiled detective fiction of Samuel Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. These stories were built less on the plot but used the quick wit of the detective, aimed at more realism and reflected the atmosphere of the depression era. No wonder that two of these, The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep resurrected in the classic film noirs of 1941 and 1946 with Humphrey Bogart in the main role. These would be worth a separate entry here, so I think I will leave it at that for now.