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neither of them combines history and detective work with the success and
panache of Cyril Hare's Dr. Wencelaus Bottwink in
An English Murder.
Hare appreciated to the full the detective-historian analogy by making his
detective a Central European Jewish refugee historian, who has been in–
vited to an English manor house to work on documents in the muniment
room. A curious outsider to English social life, the professor has an insid–
er's knowledge of English political history, which enables him to solve a
current political crime committed in the house where he is working.
The examples of Carr, de la Torre, Tey, and Hare can be looked at in
the light of a problem noted in principle by John Buchan, who wrote
historical novels and histories as well as his more famous spy stories, such
as
The Thirty-Nine Steps.
In dramatizing history there is the difficulty that
"to get the best results as literature it is unfortunately true that the narra–
tive must fail a little as history." Similarly, when it succceds as history, it
may fail a little as literature becausc the research tends to overwhelm the
literary problems of charactcrization and narrative developmcnt. Carr un–
derstood the problem well in theory; he noted in
The Murder of Sir
Edmllnd Godfrey
that while true-crime stories may be psychologically in–
teresting, "c'est magnifiquc, mais ce n'est pas Ie roman policier." Life, like
some blundering Dr. Watson, might ignore the implicit rules of fiction
and even reveal the culprit to be someone who has all along been sus–
pected, or might "whisk out of the cupboard somebody of whom the
reader has never previously heard." Carr thought he had found in the
Godfrey case, however, "a very nearly perfect detective story" in which
the reader could pursue "thc shrewdly scattered clues" to the real mur–
derer, who could "walk and talk unsuspected throughout the story"
among "half a dozen persons who might have committed the murder,
each suspected in turn, and each in turn proved innocent."
Carr unfortunately does not satisfy his own criteria. He examines the
case closely for at least thirteen different suspects, but as Cyril Hare noted,
it is "comparatively easy to hide a joker in a full pack. The three-card
trick takes some doing." Carr himself admits that "no fiction writer
would dare to be as complicated" as thc scene of the Godfrey case, with
so many characters "all treading on each other's heels and confusing each
other's trails." As fiction, his history disappoints by whisking out of the
cupboard a murderer who has only briefly been glimpsed before in the
story; as history, it disappoints by giving the culprit, the brutal Philip
Herbert, Earl of Pembrokc, a mcrely private motive of revenge for
Godfrey's role in a grand jury that had once indicted Herbert.
A contemporary historian, Stephen Knight, in
The Killing ofJustice
Godfrey,
has also fingered the same Mad Peer, but by looking further into
the life of the victim he has provided a more convincing (and compli-
