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INTRODUCTION

some horrible and apparently inexplicable murder or portent; the machinery of detection is then brought in to solve the mystery and punish the murderer. Since Poe’s time all three branches—detection, mystery, and horror—have flourished. We have such pleasant little puzzles as Conan Doyle’s Case of Identity, in which there is nothing to shock or horrify; we have mere fantasies of blood and terror—human, as in Conan Doyle’s The Case of Lady Sannox,[1] or supernatural, as in Marion Crawford’s The Upper Berth;[2] most satisfactory of all, perhaps, we have such fusions as The Speckled Band,[3] or The Hammer of God,[4] in which the ghostly terror is invoked only to be dispelled.

It is rather puzzling that the detective-story should have had to wait so long to find a serious exponent. Having started so well, why did it not develop earlier? The Oriental races, with their keen appreciation of intellectual subtlety, should surely have evolved it. The germ was there. “Why do you not come to pay your respects to me?” says Æsop’s lion to the fox. “I beg your Majesty’s pardon,” says the fox, “but I noticed the track of the animals that have already come to you; and, while I see many hoof-marks going in, I see none coming out. Till the animals that have entered your cave come out again, I prefer to remain in the open air.” Sherlock Holmes could not have reasoned more lucidly from the premises.

Cacus the robber, be it noted, was apparently the first criminal to use the device of forged footprints to mislead the pursuer, though it is a long development from his primitive methods to the horses shod with cow-shoes in Conan Doyle’s Adventure of the Priory School.[5] Hercules’s methods of investigation, too, were rather of the rough and ready sort, though the reader will not fail to observe that this early detective was accorded divine honours by his grateful clients.

The Jews, with their strongly moral preoccupation, were, as our two Apocryphal stories show, peculiarly fitted to produce the roman policier.[6] The Romans, logical and given to law-making, might have been expected to do something with it, but they did not. In one of the folk-tales collected by the Grimms, twelve maidens disguised as men are set to walk across a floor strewn with peas, in the hope that their shuffling feminine tread will betray them; the maidens are, however, warned, and baffle the detectives by treading firmly. In an Indian folk-tale a similar ruse is more successful. Here a suitor is disguised as a woman, and has to be picked out from the women about him by the wise princess. The princess throws a lemon to each in turn, and the disguised man is detected by his instinctive action in clapping his knees together to catch the lemon, whereas the real

  1. ↑ Conan Doyle: Round the Red Lamp.
  2. ↑ Marion Crawford: Uncanny Tales.
  3. ↑ Conan Doyle: Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
  4. ↑ G. K. Chesterton: The Innocence of Father Brown.
  5. ↑ Conan Doyle: The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
  6. ↑ In Bel and the Dragon the science of deduction from material clues, in the popular Scotland Yard manner, is reduced to its simplest expression. Susanna, on the other hand, may be taken as foreshadowing the Gallic method of eliciting the truth by the confrontation of witnesses.
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