The Critics’ Corner

The Proto-Detective Novel

by Bertil Falk

Don, I would love to write about Emma as a “proto-detective novel,” as you put it, were it not for the very fact that Emma is neither a detective novel nor a “proto-detective novel,” for there is no detection in the story. The mystery is solved when the “perpetrator” finds it safe to reveal the truth.

Now, Emma is not the first and not the last story with a mystery that is not solved through detection. There are thrillers, love stories, adventure tales etc like that. But Emma is as far as I understand the only story where there are clues that make it possible for a clever reader, who carefully scrutinizes every cue, dialogue and monologue, to solve the mystery before the “perpetrator” comes forward. And for sure, no story like that had been written 200 years ago, when the novel was ‘soft in Jane Austen’s hands” as Virginia Woolf said.

Does that make Emma a proto-detective story? Or does it only make it a detective story when a reader is able to draw the proper conclusions? (I am of course not going to tell you the solution of the mystery.)

John Dickson Carr, who wrote that incredible puzzle story with two impossible murders called The Hollow Man (also called The Three Coffins), stated in his essay “The Grandest Game in the World” that a detective story should be “a duel between author and reader,” and he adds that the “fine detective story, be it repeated, does not consist of a clue. It is a ladder of clues, a pattern of evidence, joined together with such cunning that even the experienced reader may be deceived until, in the blaze of the surprise ending, he suddenly sees the whole design.”

In that sense, Jane Austen for sure foreshadowed Carr, but not with a surprise ending. The problem of the “piano” is disclosed some time before the happy ending and has a bearing on Jane Austen’s ultimate goal. Whatever Jane Austen had in mind, it was probably not a duel between her and us.

Now, as to detective stories, there have been many so called detective apocrypha. Solomon was probably the first clever problem solver, and another guy from the Old Testament, Daniel, did a very good job when solving the Case of Susanna at her bath and the Case of the Baal priests, where he sort of anticipates fingerprints (actually footprints) and solves a locked room mystery.

In his The Roots of Detection, Bruce Cassidy, himself a fine writer of detective stories, mentions an even earlier locked room mystery by Herodotus. Detection is tried, but in that case the efforts are in vain. The perpetrator reveals how it has been done as does the perpetrator in Emma.

To mention a few more detectives in the world of apocrypha, we have Sancho Panza in Don Quixote, the Duke of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Henry VI (part 2, scene 1) and of course Voltaire’s Zadig, but the stories about Zadig are not criminal tales. Zadig is nevertheless even more clever a detective by deduction than even Sherlock Holmes, who ultimately adopted the method of detection as the very nucleus of the detective yarn. But that is of course another story.

Bertil

Copyright © 2008 by Bertil Falk

Thank you, Bertil, for a fine overview of early “detectives” in classical literature as well as the references to works on the genre.

Zadig compares favorably to Sherlock Holmes? I’m sure that Voltaire would have thoroughly enjoyed Conan Doyle’s stories: they’re a model of rationalism triumphant. But rationalism by no means excludes drama, witness television’s House, a latter-day Sherlock Holmes interpreted by Hugh Laurie.

I remember an incident in Zadig, where Zadig intervenes well-intentionedly in a violent husband-wife quarrel on behalf of the woman. Surprise: the wife upbraids Zadig severely, telling him that she loves her husband and deserves to be chastised, and that Zadig ought to mind his own business. Abashed and confused, Zadig retreats, vowing to reassess his role as the world’s policeman.

Of course, my suggestion that Emma might be a proto-detective story was made tongue-in-cheek: we’ve all been aware that you like mystery stories very much, and your essay on Jane Austen’s Emma does emphasize that a minor mystery is embedded in the plot. Of course, the novel itself is more properly a comedy of manners.

Don