“Terminus, mate,” he said. “Tram don’t go no further.”
Bert Higgins left the tram. The streets were very dark and the fog was thickening. But Bert could see quite clearly where he was. That was Westbury Terrace. Why had he come to Westbury Terrace? Force of habit, he supposed. Was the house still empty or had it a new tenant? He did not want to walk down that familiar street but his feet dragged him forward.
There stood the door, same as ever, a dirty green. It hadn’t had a spot of paint on it for years.
But the steps were nice and white. Who could have cleaned them, now Amy was gone. He pushed open the door and entered the hall. A light shone from the kitchen and someone was standing at the wooden table. It was a woman and her back was turned to him. She stood at the table with a rolling pin in her hand, rolling... rolling.
The woman turned and looked at him. She was all in white... in her wedding dress, and there was flour on her forearms.
“Hello, Bert,” said Amy, “thought you was never comin’.”
“Yes, Mr. Coroner,” said the prison doctor, “death was practically instantaneous. The pulse had already ceased to beat when I reached the body. The man was dead before he knew it.”
When the world was born, Man came first and Woman second. God so ordained. When the detective in fiction was born, Man again came first and Woman second — so Man himself ordained. If we think of Poe’s Dupin as the Adam of story-book sleuths, who is the Eve? The Lord said: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him.” And out of the man’s rib made He a woman — and so it came to pass in fictional ferretry. A full twenty years after the creation of Dupin an unknown writer brought forth the first detectivette, and so shrouded in mystery is her origin that we still have only tentative data on her nativity. We do know that
5. “Anonyma’s”
THE EXPERIENCES OF A LADY DETECTIVE
London:? Charles H. Clarke, 1861
actually exists as a book, but we have never set eyes on a copy of it. A sequel was published three years later titled REVELATIONS OF A LADY DETECTIVE (London: George Vickers, 1864) and from this second series we learn that Mrs. Paschal, the first petticoated policeman, embarked (using her own words) in a career at once strange, exciting, and mysterious when her husband died suddenly, leaving her badly off. An offer (still quoting the lady herself) was made to her through a peculiar channel. She accepted without hesitation, and became one of the much-dreaded, but little-known people called Female Detectives, at the time she was verging on forty (even in the literature of detection Life Begins At Forty). Mrs. Paschal’s brain, she tells us, was vigorous and subtle; she was well born and well educated, so that, like an accomplished actress, she could play her part in any drama with nerve and strength, cunning and confidence, and resources unlimited... That was nearly a hundred years ago: women have not changed — in real life or in fiction.
In 1862 Thomas Bailey Aldrich made a curious and interesting contribution to the detective short story — a contribution which today is completely unhonored and unsung, for the simple reason that it is so completely unknown, and consequently unread. In
6. Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s
OUT OF HIS HEAD
New York: Carleton, 1862
Chapters XI through XIV (titled The Danseuse, A Mystery, Thou Art the Man, and Paul’s Confession) constitute a detective short story of approximately 5000 words. This excerpt from Aldrich’s novelette reveals the author’s enormous debt to Poe: the style, although retaining Aldrich’s cameo-cut phrasing, clearly shows the influence of Poe, and the general plot derives just as clearly from The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Yet, in the character of his detective, Paul Lynde (“It is a way of mine to put this and that together!”), and in the specific construction of the plot, Aldrich adds at least three significant points of development to the detective story: one. he created the first variation-solution to Poe’s basic conception of the “locked room” mystery; two, he carried on Poe’s tradition of an eccentric sleuth, but Aldrich pushed the characterization to the absolute extreme — for Aldrich’s detective is not merely an eccentric, he is a madman; three, Aldrich wrote what is probably the earliest example of a detective story in which the protagonist is not only the detective but also the murderer, in the sense that the detective himself is responsible for the murder having been committed. Add to these developments of technique the fact that Aldrich’s OUT OF HIS HEAD contains the first detective story written by an American to appear in book form after the publication of Poe’s tall TALES — the first in seventeen long and barren years! — and recognition, however belated, must be accorded to the historical importance of Aldrich’s “unknown” experiment.
Thus far our cornerstones stick closely to the pure detective story, which is composed of three essential ingredients: first, a detective story must contain a detective who detects; second, the detective should be the protagonist; and third, the detective should almost invariably triumph — that is, he (or she) should unmask the murderer, catch the thief, snare the swindler, or thwart the blackmailer. But what of the crook story in which a criminal is the principal character and in which the criminal outwits the forces of law and order?
The antihero, representing “detection in reverse,” has not yet cracked open his (or her) eggshell in the short form — he is still germinating; but even the detective world was so made that certain signs come before certain events. The first important foreshadowing of crime-in-the-ascendancy in the short story is
7. Mark Twain’s
THE CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY
New York: С. H. Webb, 1867
This acknowledged classic of legend and folklore is an early example of the confidence game in fiction. If this statement surprises you, reread Mark Twain’s tale of trickery and ask yourself: When the slick stranger filled Jim Smiley’s frog, Dan’l Webster, full of quail-shot, wasn’t he really playing the con?
It is time now for France to make its first significant contribution to the detective short story, and it is only literary justice that le premier pas be taken by the first great French master of the detective story. In
8. Émilе Gaboriau’s
LE PETIT VIEUX DES BATIGNOLLES
(the little old man of batignolles)
Paris: E. Dentu, 1876
London: Vizetelly, 1884
the title story is a novelette about detective Méchinet; but the book also contains a short story titled Missing! in which the “famous” detective Retiveau, nicknamed Maitre Magloire, investigates the disappearance of Theodore Jandidier, an honorable manufacturer of the Rue du Roi de Sicile. This historically important short story is a typical Gaboriau murder-novel in miniature — longwinded for modern taste but full of French flavor, Gallic gusto, and ratiocinative realism. Quotations from the story reveal the Gaboriau touch: for example, when it is learned that M. Jandidier has “vanished, evaporated,” we are told that alarm spreads and that prudent people invest money in sword sticks and revolvers; detective Magloire is described as “a man of no little energy, and a fervent believer in the value of time... his alacrity was proverbial”; the chief suspect is a character named Jules Tarot — “a mother-of-pearl worker... he polishes the shells, and is most skilful in imparting the proper nacreous iridescence”; there is that delicious detectival moment, so dear to the hearts of classicists, when “all the drawers were turned out, and all the cupboards carefully explored,” when Magloire “ferreted in every nook and corner, ripped up the mattresses and pillows on the bed, tried the stuffing of the chairs, but all to no avail... nothing suspicious could be found”; that even more nostalgic moment when, anticipating Sherlock Holmes, the detective mutters: “It’s singular”; that “unexpected” denouement when the man of severe morality is exposed as a gambler on the Bourse, when the virtuous husband is revealed to have kept a mistress.
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