Abstract
Writing in late 1941, the American historian of detective fiction Howard Haycraft noted that a ban on works by Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace imposed by fascist Italy in 1939 was followed two years later by a Nazi party order for the ‘withdrawal of all imported detective fiction from German bookshops’ (312).1 Haycraft elaborates a connection between detective fiction and democracy, suggesting that it is precisely the existence, in democracies, of the ‘credo that no man shall be convicted of crime in the absence of reasonable proof’ (313), as well as strict rules of evidence, that provides the underpinning of the detective genre. Detective fiction therefore depends on and reinforces those regulatory systems that are absent under dictatorship. The corollary of this is an increase in the popularity of detective fiction, within democracies, at times of ‘doubt and distress’ (321);2 Haycraft believes in the power of these fictions to serve as a reminder of the civilized values that may appear to be under threat. Implicitly, then, the uncertainties of daily life in wartime can be subsumed by the temporary anxieties of the ’whodunit’.
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Notes
Although Priestman discusses The Ministry of Fear in this context, most of his examples from the 1940s are of American noir fictions, such as John Franklin Bardin’s Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly (1948).
According to one of his biographers, Patrick Hamilton, whose popular stage play Gaslight (1938) employs elements of Victorian stage melodrama, ‘toyed with the idea of writing a three-volume Victorian thriller à la Wilkie Collins’ (Jones 225) before embarking on Hangover Square.
The golden age is usually defined as the period between the publication of Agatha Christie’s first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
and the appearance of Dorothy L. Sayers last novel, Busman’s Honeymoon (1937),
although E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913) is sometimes identified as the inaugural example.
A longer version of this account of the development of the novel appears in Greene’s Ways of Escape 93–100. Greene notes that the ‘funny’ aspect fell by the wayside long before the book was completed. His typology seems to refer to the works of Freeman Wills Crofts, whose Inspector French stories often rely on the mechanics of, for example, railway timetables, Dorothy L. Sayers The Nine Tailors (1934) in which campanology plays an important part, and Agatha Christie’s or Ngaio Marsh’s country house murders. Michael Innes (the pseudonym of J. I. M. Stewart) had published several of his quirky detective novels featuring Inspector Appleby by the time of Greene’s journey in late 1941. The Secret Vanguard (1940) uses the device of a character unwittingly overhearing a secret message being passed, but despite its country house setting, Hamlet, Revenge! (1937) seems more likely to have influenced Greene, not least because its plot is a combination of spy story and detective story. Both Greene and his brother Hugh were collectors of detective stories from their youth, and Brian Diemert suggests A. E. W. Mason’s At the Villa Rose (1910), which features a murder at a séance, as another possible influence on The Ministry of Fear (153).
The idea that a detective story could adequately represent the experience of wartime is debunked in Richard Mason’s The Wind Cannot Read (1947). The narrator’s friend Peter announces: ‘I’ve been writing a book. […] It’s going to be the great book of the war. An epic. What All Quiet on the Western Front was to the last war, and For Whom the Bell Tolls to the Spanish War, my book will be to World War Two. Unfortunately I can’t make up my mind whether it shall be The War Office Murder, or One of Our Bodies is Missing’ (81). When the book is completed, it is in fact an account of a wartime escape from France over the Pyrenees (165).
A film version of the novel was released in 1948. It was banned from exhibition by many local authorities but Ross McKibbin notes that ‘[i]n those areas where it was shown it broke all records’ (441 n.76). An incident in Mary Renault’s North Face (1949), indicates the continuing allure of the novel. On holiday in a boarding house and short of reading material, Miss Fisher looks among the sofa cushions: ‘She had noticed, the evening before, that this was where Miss Lettice Winter put her copy of No Orchids for Miss Blandish when her mother came into the room. Miss Fisher had heard interesting accounts of it, and it might still be there’ (46). Unfortunately, it isn’t.
In Nevil Shute’s The Chequer Board (1947), hospitalized Commando Corporal Brent finds True TaIes of Adventure ‘thin watery, stuff’ (37) compared to his own experiences and decides to ‘ask sister if she’s got one with more ginger in it […] Girls and that. Maybe they’ll have a copy of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, or one o’them’ (37). Notably, No Orchids also makes use of amnesia as a plot device. Having been terrorised and drugged by her captors, Miss Blandish emerges unable to remember her own name and this is symbolic of the brutalisation she has undergone.
This is usually the case even in contemporary examples of the ‘amnesia thriller’ which often display a thorough understanding of the psychological effects of trauma; see for example Minette Walters, The Dark Room (1995)
and Nicci French, Land of the Living (2003).
Agatha Christie uses the device of feigned amnesia in a non-parodic way in her novel The Secret Adversary (1922). A young woman claims not to be able to remember being handed secret papers by a fellow-passenger before the evacuation of the Lusitania, in order to prevent the papers falling into the wrong hands. Her performance is believed because her captors are incredulous that a young girl could have read enough to be able to dissemble such a disorder successfully. Jared Cade suggests that this plot could explain Christie’s own apparently amnesiac interlude in 1925 (126).
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© 2006 Victoria Stewart
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Stewart, V. (2006). Damaged Minds Crime and Detection. In: Narratives of Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230624986_3
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