Mariam Adamyan- LIC, IV year, Area Studies IV Group

COMPRESSION OF INFORMATION IN SHORT STORIES BY AGATHA

CHRISTIE
WHAT IS A DETECTIVE STORY?
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the
mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
~Albert Einstein
Detective fiction is one of the most popular genres in the twentieth century, and
increasingly so in the twenty-first. An estimated one-quarter of books published in the English
language today are in the detective fiction genre. Reasons for this popularity include the
following: there is much pleasure derived from reading this type of fiction; a sense of justice is
usually involved; detective fiction restores a sense of order; it explores the human condition; it
demands both interesting characters and well-crafted plots in intriguing settings; it contains
suspense and mystery; and it functions to comment on society.
The detective story is a genre of fiction in which a detective, either an amateur or a
professional, solves a crime or a series of crimes. “The detective story is a perennial favorite,
the tale in which some baffling mystery is presented to the reader, usually involving a murder,
and only one gifted individual, the starring detective, can actually solve it. The solution is
often clever, surprising and sometimes borders on the incredible” (Davies 2006, 11). The
word ‘detective’ comes from the French 'detrere', which means ‘to seek’. “Publishers’
advertising usually lists it simply as “mystery”, and many critics treat detective fiction and
crime fiction as the same thing” (Dove 1996, 1). Detective stories rely on logic, and
supernatural elements rarely come into play.
Origins of the genre are difficult to define because all narratives contain conflict. For
instance, wasn’t the story of Cain and Abel the first murder case? During the Renaissance period
and after, many writers relied on murders and assassination in their plays and tales. For instance,
Shakespeare’s writing involved murder and assassination as key plot elements in his tragedies
and historical plays. Characters motivated by desire for power or revenge are central to the
themes, although they are not central in classic mysteries, as the audience always knows
“whodunit.” Murder has long been part of narrative, but to be a work of detective fiction, the
story needs a detective as the central character.
The history of detective stories is quite old. Some of the oldest come from Asia, where
detective stories were especially popular in China, and from the Islamic world. In the English-
speaking world, an explosion of detective stories occurred in the 19th century. Most scholars
today agree that the first short stories in detective fiction were by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849),
American poet, author, and literary critic. Poe had an interest in puzzles, codes, and
cryptograms. He started to write the tale in which an unusual individual either in an amateur or
professional capacity solves a crime that has apparently perplexed everyone else. Edgar Allan
Poe is considered to be the father of the detective story. After some time many were published in
the form of serials, which people could read in inexpensive newspapers.
Subgenres of detective stories include the soft-boiled (cozy) and the hard-boiled stories.
Soft-boiled (cozy) detective stories tend to focus more on plot twist and development sometimes
called a whodunit as the audience solves the crime along with the detective. Soft-boiled
mysteries began in the late twentieth century as a reinvention of the Golden Age “whodunit”.
These novels generally shy away from violence and suspense and frequently feature female
amateur detectives. Cozy mysteries were initially written by British writers during the interwar
years. Agatha Christie’s novels characterize – indeed epitomize – the cozy mystery. American
authors saw soft-boiled mysteries as implausible and artificial. In the late 1920s, they began
writing hard-boiled novels in reaction to the lack of realism in the cozy. A hard-boiled detective
novel is a gritty detective story with a street smart professional investigator at its core. These
realistic novels are generally set in a world permeated by violence and corruption. The term
comes from a process of hardening of an egg; to be hardboiled is to be comparatively tough.
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were early masters of the new hard-boiled form.
Characteristics of the soft-boiled or cozy mystery novel
• Characters are frequently from the middle and upper classes
• The detective often has aristocratic connections, usually is an amateur, and sometimes
exhibits eccentric habits
 • The detective in not a loner but is tied into a community and works with a close-knit
circle of family, friends, and acquaintances (Charles, Morrison, and Clark 2002, 57)
• Characters have great faith in the power of reason to solve mysteries and restore order
• Settings tend to be rural rather than urban, a small village rather than a large
metropolis, and English rather than American or non-English
• There is little explicit violence; the murder often happens offstage
• The plot is puzzle-oriented, operating within the rules of fair play between the author
and the reader
• The author presents clues that are readily available to the reader but difficult to fathom
because of red herrings and false leads
• Soft-boiled writers favour certain plot devices: the villain assumes a false identity; the
murder weapon is cleverly hidden; the chronology of the plot is confused (Panek 2000, 96);
characters congregate in a room for the revelation of the mystery; the crime is committed in a
locked-room – a seemingly impossible situation
• Writers use the drawing-room diction of polite society (Rzepka 2005, 179). The
language is literary rather than colloquial, and characters do not swear or use slang
• The vision of the world is essentially one of order and coherence. As Cawelti
suggests, “evil is an abnormal disruption of an essentially benevolent social order” (1976,
149).
Some of the most popular cozy writers are: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers,
Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Jane Langton, Amanda Cross,
Martha Grimes, Elizabeth Peters, Diane Mott Davidson, Lilian Jackson Braun, and Janet
Evanovich.
Characteristics of the hard-boiled mystery novel
• Characters are often from the working class
• The detective is usually a private eye, rarely has aristocratic connections, does not
make much money, and is not concerned to do so. As Panek suggests, “Hard-boiled detectives
tend to be proletariat heroes for whom wealth and luxury mean corruption” (2000, 93)
 • The detective is a loner with few close connections to others, someone “at odds with
the outside world” (Charles, Morrison, and Clark 2002, 57). He/she has no patience with the
system and usually works outside it
• The detective is often independent, rebellious, cynical, hard-drinking, and above all
tough. He/she continually faces “assault, capture, drugging, blackjacking, and attempted
assassination as a regular feature of his/her investigations” (Cawelti 1976, 143)
• The detective is witty, fast-thinking, and always ready with a rejoinder or wise-crack
• The detective encounters intimidation and temptation, and is forced to define his/her
own concept of morality and justice. Since the detective’s moral code is often in conflict with
that of the police, he/she is sometimes forced to break rules (Cawelti 1976, 143)
• The detective, as Cawelti points out, is a “defender of the innocent, an avenger of the
wronged, the one loyal, honest, truly moral man in a corrupt and ambiguous world” (1976,
151).
• Criminals often have connections with organized crime
• The setting is usually the big city, a place of corruption and violence. The mean streets
rather than the country manor provide the backdrop for the action
• The hard-boiled world is gritty, brutal, and corrupt, one “in which no one is trusted
and all must be tested” (Rzepka 2005, 180). The moral point of reference is the detective.
• Graphic descriptions of violence.
• The language reflects the world of the streets; it is typically gritty, colloquial, and
graphic. “Spurning the drawing-room diction of polite society,” writes Rzepka, “the tough-guy
writers cultivated a brusque, clipped, vernacular style” (2005, 179).
• The detective tells the story in a detached, objective manner, usually as a first-person
narrator. He/she uses short, pointed sentences and makes terse, witty comments.
Some of the most popular hard-boiled mystery writers are: Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosley, Robert B. Parker, Sara
Paretsky, Sue Grafton, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, and Carl Hiaasen.
The detective story has the following basic and important elements—the detective, the
victim, the murderer, the suspect, the mystery, the culprit, the clues. These essential elements
keep the story running smoothly and allow the clues to the solution of the mystery to be
revealed in a logical way that the reader can follow.
The Detective
Without the detective, the detective story would be another crime story. The detective
may be a private investigator, a policeman, an elderly widow, or a young girl, but he or she
generally has nothing material to gain from solving the crime. These detectives usually are of
higher intelligence than the average reader, unmarried, with some source of income other than
a regular job, and generally have some pleasing eccentricities or striking characteristics. He or
she is never be portrayed as a fool, lest the story should turn into a comedy. The detective does
not need to be infallible and can have misjudgments and miscalculations. His function is to
gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter;
and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has
no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the
arithmetic.
The Victim
The victim has to try to satisfy two contradictory requirements. He has to involve
everyone in suspicion, which requires that he is a bad character; and he has to make everyone
feel guilty, which requires that he is a good character. He cannot be a criminal because he
could then be dealt with by the law, and murder would be unnecessary. The more general the
temptation to murder he arouses, the better, e.g. the desire for freedom is a better motive than
money alone. On the whole the best victim is the negative Father or Mother Image (Hugh
2002, 265). If there is more than one murder, the subsequent victims should be more innocent
than the initial victim. The murderer should start with a real grievance and be forced to murder
against his will where he has no grievance but his own guilt.
The Murderer
Murder is negative creation, and every murderer is therefore the rebel who claims the
right to be omnipotent. His pathos is his refusal to suffer (Hugh 2002, 265). The problem for
the writer is to conceal his pride from the other characters and from the reader, since, if a
person has this pride, it tends to appear in everything he says and does. To surprise the reader
when the identity of the murderer is revealed, yet at the same time to convince him that
everything he has previously been told about the murderer is consistent with his being a
murderer, is the test of a good detective story.
As to the murderer’s end—execution, suicide and madness—the first is preferable, for
if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he
doesn’t repent society cannot forgive. Execution is the act of atonement, by which the
murderer is forgiven by society.
The Suspect
The detective-story society is a society consisting of apparently innocent individuals.
The murder is the act of disruption by which innocence is lost, and the individual and
the law become opposed to each other. In the case of the murderer this opposition is
completely real, in the case of the suspect it is mostly apparent. The suspects must be guilty of
something, because, now that the aesthetic and the ethical are in opposition, if they are
completely innocent they lose their aesthetic interest and the reader will ignore them. For
suspects the principal causes of guilt are:
 the wish or even the intention to murder
 a hubris of intellect which tries to solve the crime itself and despises the official
police. If great enough this hubris leads to its subject getting murdered
 a hubris of innocence which refuses to co-operate with the investigation
 a lack of faith in another loved suspect, which leads its subject to hide or confuse
clues.
The Mystery
At the heart of every detective story is the mystery. A crime has been committed, and
the detective must figure out who did it, how they did it, and when they did it. The crime may
usually involve murder, theft or a simple local incident that affects only a limited group of
people. Sometimes it's a riddle or oddity that doesn't hurt anyone, but is unusual and it creates
a problem. Sometimes it's a simple puzzle that has dangerous consequences for someone. But
whatever the problem or crime, it needs to be outlined and explained, step-by-step in sequence.
 Every crime is based upon three factors: Motive, Method and Opportunity. The motive
is the reason a character would do something like commit a crime. The method is how the
problem came about or the crime committed. The opportunity involves who was nearby when
the problem happened or the crime was committed (who had an opportunity to commit the
crime).
The Culprit
Every crime needs the person who committed it. If there is a death in the story, it cannot
happen by natural causes, though it can appear to at first. The culprit must turn out to be a
person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story — that is, a person with
whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest, who must have made his
appearance in the story in some form or another and should not be merely a random passerby.
Each culprit in detective stories has a motive for the act they committed that both the reader
and the detective will uncover in the course of the story.
The Clues
Clues must be placed throughout the story so that the reader has a chance to solve the
crime on their own. Clues can be made accessible to the reader either directly within the
master narrative of the story as a whole or indirectly through statements from various
characters in it, that is through testimony. Testimonies usually offer particular points of view
—reliable, unreliable, or yet to be tried—on the relevance and meaning of the clues appearing
in them (Rzepka 2005, 18). Many writers have stated that the truth of the crime should be
available to readers at all times thereby staring them in the face.
According to "Twenty rules for writing detective stories," by Van Dine in 1928: "The
detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more — it is a sporting event. And for the
writing of detective stories there are very definite laws — unwritten, perhaps, but nonetheless
binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to
them. Herewith, then, is a sort of credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of
detective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's inner conscience."
 CONCLUSION
Detective story is a work of fiction about a puzzling crime, a number of clues, and a
detective who eventually solves the mystery. It is a kind of crime fiction that focuses on the
heroic detective as much as the crime itself. A basic description of the term is that it is a
narrative in which a main character solves a crime, usually, but not always murder, by
examining multiple clues and considering a closed circle of suspects. In most detective stories
the crime is murder and the clues lead to or away from the solution. The author presents the
crime, the detective and several clues and suspects. The climax of the story comes when the
detective reveals the criminal and tells how the mystery was solved. Though the genre is often
said to have originated with Edgar Allen Poe, detective stories have been around since ancient
times. Since the genre’s official recognition in the 1800s, detective fiction has evolved in
different ways, including adjustments to the personalities of the heroes and changes to the
tone.
There are two major types of detective stories: soft-boiled (cozy) and the hard-boiled
stories. Soft-boiled (cozy) detective stories tend to focus more on plot twist and development
sometimes called a whodunit as the audience solves the crime along with the detective. A
hard-boiled detective novel is a gritty detective story, which is generally set in a world
permeated by violence and corruption.
Detective fiction by definition contains a sleuth, a victim, a murderer, a suspect, a
mystery, a culprit and clues. The detective in most stories is not a professional police officer,
but a private consultant. The mystery is very important, emphasized, whereas the writer must
follow a set of guidelines that require fair play in the telling of the murder, presentation of the
clues and the withholding of the identity of the murderer until the end.
The detective story may be considered more limited in scope and potential. The reader
can expect to find a central mysterious death, a closed circle of suspects each with credible
motive, means and opportunity for the crime, a detective, either amateur or professional, who
comes to solve it, and a solution at the end of the book which the reader should be able to
arrive at by logical deduction from clues presented by the writer with deceptive cunning but
essential fairness.