CUSHING STROUT
The Historian and the D etective
Academics not only read and sometimes write detective stories, but the
fictional detective is often a professor of English, science, law, psychology,
medicine, or archaeology. An English professor, Marjorie Nicholson,
pointed out in 1929 that after a day spent dealing with adolescents who
have never been forced "to think or consider or judge," teachers like her–
self understandably sought escape in a form of literature that, at least in
principle, prized precisely these mental acts in its protagonists and its read–
ers. The classic story of detection, she argued, carries over into a popular
medium, in a more playful way, the same ardor of inquiry that sustains a
professional intellectual life.
Rex Stout's detective stories have in Nero Wolfe an eccentric private
detective as cerebral as Holmes, but they are fortunate in having for a
narrating Watson the more engaging and witty figure of Archie
Goodwin. In
Murder
by
the Book,
Goodwin makes an important point
about the detective story's appeal. He and Nero Wolfe spot the link be–
tween two violent deaths by noticing that the name of the same un–
known author is mentioned in writing by both victims. Tailing a mur–
derer and getting shot at in Central Park "has its attractions," Archie ob–
serves dryly to a group of secretaries, "but it's not half as exciting as spot–
ting that name." It is hard to recognize this point when so many contem–
porary crime writers do not keep their focus on the inquiry, ignoring
Dorothy Sayers's dictum that it is "artistically shocking that the reader
should be taken into the author's confidence behind the investigator's
back," a recurring eavesdropping technique which rapidly drops the story
into the class of sensational melodrama.
The position of Nicholson, Stout, and Sayers is best kept in mind if
the detective story is seen in the light of its kinship with a written history,
which is also the story of the recovery of a hidden story. The fictional
events, whether of the crime or the investigation of it, are connected so
that what happens in the story points both forward and backward, as
events in an historical narrative do. Conan Doyle was inspired by the
historian Thomas Macaulay and wrote several historical novels. He has
Dr. Watson tell us that Holmes's laborious study of early English charters
produced unrecorded "striking results," but Doyle sketched Holmes pri–
marily in the guise of a scientific, not an historical mind.
