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very convenient one for the writer. For one thing, the admiring satellite may utter expressions of eulogy which would be unbecoming in the mouth of the author, gaping at his own colossal intellect. Again, the reader, even if he is not, in R. L. Stevenson’s phrase, “always a man of such vastly greater ingenuity than the writer,” is usually a little more ingenious than Watson. He sees a little further through the brick wall; he pierces, to some extent, the cloud of mystification with which the detective envelops himself. “Aha!” he says to himself, “the average reader is supposed to see no further than Watson. But the author has not reckoned with me. I am one too many for him.” He is deluded. It is all a device of the writer’s for flattering him and putting him on good terms with himself. For though the reader likes to be mystified, he also likes to say, “T told you so,” and “I spotted that.” And this leads us to the third great advantage of the Holmes-Watson convention: by describing the clues as presented to the dim eyes and bemused mind of Watson, the author is enabled to preserve a spurious appearance of frankness, while keeping to himself the special knowledge on which the interpretation of those clues depends. This is a question of paramount importance, involving the whole artistic ethic of the detective-story. We shall return to it later. For the moment, let us consider a few other interesting types and formulæ which make their first appearance in Poe.
The personality of Dupin is eccentric, and for several literary generations
eccentricity was highly fashionable among detective heroes. Dupin, we are informed,
had a habit of living behind closed shutters, illumined by "a couple
of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest
of rays." From this stronghold he issued by night, to promenade the streets and
enjoy the "infinity of mental excitement" afforded by quiet observation. He was
also given to startling his friends by analysing their thought processes, and he had
a rooted contempt for the methods of the police.
Sherlock Holmes modelled himself to a large extent upon Dupin, substituting cocaine for candlelight, with accompaniments of shag and fiddle-playing. He is a more human and endearing figure than Dupin, and has earned his reward the supreme honour which literature has to bestow—the secular equivalent of canonisation. He has passed into the language. He also started a tradition of his own—the hawk-faced tradition, which for many years dominated detective fiction.
So strong, indeed, was this domination that subsequent notable eccentrics have displayed their eccentricities chiefly by escaping from it. "Nothing," we are told, "could have been less like the traditional detective than"—so-and-so. He may be elderly and decrepit, like Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner, whose characteristic habit is the continual knotting of string. Or he may be round and innocent-looking, like Father Brown or Poirot. There is Sax Rohmer's Moris Klaw,[1] with his bald, scholarly forehead; he irrigates his wits with a verbena spray, and carries about with him an "odically-sterilised" cushion to promote psychic intuition. There is the great Dr. Thorndyke, probably the handsomest detective in fiction; he is outwardly bonhumous, but spiritually de-
- ↑ Sax Rahmer: The Dream Detective