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for murdering Warbeck's son. Hare's elegant plot makes the point that
this has been an essentially English crime because it presupposed a specific
and unique "social and political framework." Detectives and historians
alike need to take note that "a motive valid for one form of society may
be totally non-existent in another." Hare would have thoroughly grasped
Robin Winks's point that "the historian must be slow to read into an–
other age the motivations of his own." Carr, de la Torre, and Tey, by
contrast, tend to take too much for granted the sameness of motivation
over time and place in the crimes they reconstruct.
It must be conceded that while fictional detectives want to solve
problems in terms of finding out what deeds were done, social and cul–
tural historians are characteristically more concerned with the meaning in
a group's life of certain texts, rites, laws, customs, and collective attitudes.
Even here, nevertheless, there is a kinship to writers such as Arthur
Upfield and Tony Hillerman, whose half-Aborigine or Navajo police–
men, respectively, bring their intimate personal knowledge of tribal lore
to bear in finding solutions to fictional crimes, whether in Australia or
New Mexico.
The popular recognition of the historian-detective analogy can be
marked by the extraordinary appearance on the bestseller list in 1983 of
Umberto Eco's
The Name oj the Rose.
The book's popularity is even more
mysterious than the mystery it dramatizes, for Eco plunges his readers -
along with his medieval version of Sherlock Holmes, Brother William of
Baskerville - into the dense thickets of fourteenth-century history and
theology, including large patches of untranslated Latin. It is a
tour de Jorce
that is a far cry from the traditional notion of the detective story as a
recreational form, what E.
C.
Bentley (in dedicating
Trent's Last Case
to
G.
K.
Chesterton) called "light reading."
Cyril Hare, who had won a first in history at Oxford, tried to make
his fictional solutions to crime as credible as a jury, rather than a sleepy
reader, would demand, but he was never pretentious. The detective story
writer might get "very near indeed to the status of a good novelist," he
believed, but getting there would take place within the limiting conven–
tion of his genre : characters who exist for the sake of being detected or
being suspected cannot be fully developed without revealing too much.
P. D. James is much closer to Hare than to Eco, for though her well–
wrought crime fiction increasingly has moral, sociological, or psychologi–
cal weight, following Dorothy Sayers's path in moving their genre further
towards the novel of manners, James never has forgotten her contract
with the reader: "It's important the plot should stand out, that the clues
should be fair."
James too has tried her hand at history, but not in the form of a
