In Defense of The Supernatural in Detective Fiction

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From Crime Reads:

Some months ago, I had dinner in New York with an old friend, one of the most senior figures in the American mystery community. We tend to differ on almost every subject under the sun, food and wine apart, but it is possible to disagree without being disagreeable, and I like to think that we have both mastered that art, for the most part.

Toward the end of the evening, my friend suggested that I had made two errors in my career. One was the decision not to write exclusively in the mystery genre, but to explore other areas of writing. This, he felt, had damaged me commercially—although, as I pointed out to him, it had benefited me creatively. My second error, he believed, was to have mixed the mystery genre with the supernatural. Whatever its benefits or disadvantages to me, either commercially or creatively, he believed that this simply should not have been done. For him, the supernatural had no place in the mystery novel, and there are many in mystery community who share his opinion.

Naturally enough, I demurred. This perceived line of demarcation between the genres is largely a product of the early part of the last century. If we are to point the finger at a single culprit, we may choose Father Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, the British writer, critic, and theologian. Knox was a witty, urbane Catholic cleric, although a little too clever for some.

. . . .

Perhaps the most famous popular demonstration of Knox’s cleverness are his 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction, a set of rules for crime writing published in 1929, of which the Second advises: “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” Knox, one can’t help but feel, was probably writing with his tongue fixed ever-so-gently in his cheek (his Fifth Commandment declares that “No Chinaman must figure in the story,” a wag of the finger in the direction of purveyors of the so-called “Yellow Peril” school of crime writing.) Yet while some of Knox’s rules fell by the wayside, or were deliberately violated by storytellers . . . his injunction against the supernatural appeared to become engrained in the lore of genre, with only very occasional exceptions, William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel Falling Angel possibly being the most notable of them.

The crime novel is a product of rationalism, which predicates the value of reason over experience or, indeed, spiritual revelation. But as I tried to explain to my dinner companion, the relationship between crime writers and rationalism has always been more fraught, and more creatively interesting, than the purism of Knox—or, more correctly, his followers—allows. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, published in 1868 and generally regarded as the first modern detective novel, is suffused with a fear of the supernatural. The theft of the titular Indian diamond by Colonel Herncastle during the Siege of Seringapatam seems to unleash all manner of misfortune on his niece, Rachel Verinder, and her family. Whether the Moonstone is actually cursed or not is beside the point. What matters is the belief that a curse may exist.

Or take Edgar Allan Poe, possibly one of the least rational men ever to have set foot on God’s earth.

. . . .

But the most interesting case of all is that of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the paragon of logical detection, Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle believed in the Cottingley Fairies, an infamous British photographic hoax perpetrated in 1917, and attended séances in the company of Harry Houdini in the hope that Houdini would help him to spot fake mediums—not because Conan Doyle was a skeptic, but quite the opposite: he wished to locate true mediums in order to communicate with his dead wife and child.

. . . .

Philosophically—and, indeed, creatively, given Conan Doyle’s own preference for his historical novels—Conan Doyle’s worldview seems entirely at odds with that of his own most successful creation, and I can’t help but wonder if the two happiest words he ever committed to print were those he wrote in his diary after sending the great detective over the Reichenbach Falls in 1893: “Killed Holmes.”

. . . .

My dinner guest was having none of it. One could not, he affirmed, view a writer’s art in the context of his life. Some degree of separation was required. As a writer, I considered that a writer’s life and his creative work remained inseparable. I fell back on the words of the poet W.B. Yeats (who was, along with Conan Doyle, a member of the paranormal research body known as the ‘Ghost Club’): “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Link to the rest at Crime Reads

5 thoughts on “In Defense of The Supernatural in Detective Fiction”

  1. Good thing they don’t permit comments at Crime Reads.

    Conan Doyle didn’t wish “to locate true mediums in order to communicate with his dead wife and child.” He held a longtime interest in spiritualism when he was a newly minted doctor in Portsmouth, attending local seances and even writing an article for a psychic journal.

    And if the Irish have an intellectual superiority over England, it certainly isn’t demonstrated by Brexit.

    It seems that discussing successful examples of supernatural mysteries would have argued his point more effectively than this rag-bag of trivia.

  2. Well, it’s just silly to blame Knox. He was describing an ideal of the “Fair Play” detective story, but he was mostly saying that it wasn’t fair play for the supernatural to bypass logic and forensics in a fictional investigation. He wasn’t saying that there couldn’t be anything supernatural whatever. Hunches are not banned. God is not banned. Magic is okay. Mysterious hunch dreams are okay. Heck, women’s or cop’s intuition is okay. But then you have to investigate everything else too, and you have to prove what you think.

    In real life and in fiction, there is a big line between “I pretty much know this guy did it” and “I have proof that this guy did it.” No-supernatural rules are supposed to dramatize that line, not prohibit the supernatural.

    Knox was writing at a time when there were a lot of thrillers where people used “psychic powers” or “women’s intuition” to bypass figuring things out. He was trying to tell authors that they can’t just use cheap gimmes and gotchas, like “And the murderer was a guy you have never met in the story. Why didn’t you guess?”

    The Judge Dee mysteries hadn’t come out yet, but the traditional Chinese mysteries that they drew from, did have direct revelation from the gods and so forth. It takes away the drama if it is too direct (like an apparition in the courtroom, and everybody going along with it). If it is controlled and used for color and drama, it enhances the story.

    Similarly, we don’t get the truth out of people by torture, although that was also a feature of real and fictional traditional Chinese judicial procedure. The author of the Judge Dee mysteries goes to great lengths to satisfy both historical plausibility, and the need to avoid Chinese tropes that would kill a Western mystery.

    • Knox wrote before the fantasy genre was really a thing, particularly not in conventions.

      You can only really write a fantasy mystery if you set up the rules in such a way that the reader can distinguish possibilities from impossibilities and red herrings from genuine clues. That wasn’t how you wrote supernatural agencies in his day.

  3. Doyle attended seances with Houdini hoping to contact his deceased son — and that included seances in which Doyle’s very living wife was the medium. One of the reasons for Doyle and Houdini to have a falling out was that Doyle’s wife claimed to have made contact with Houdini’s mother via automatic writing, but, the automatic writing opened with three crosses across the top of the page and was entirely in English.

    As Houdini’s mother was an Hungarian Jewish woman in life who did not speak English, this was deeply offensive to Houdini.

  4. Ronald Knox (1888-1957) wrote 63 books. I have at least 55 of them on my shelves. Half a dozen were detective stories, which appeared from 1925 to 1937.

    Knox’s literary executor was novelist Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a fine biography titled “Monsignor Ronald Knox” (1959).

    Referring to the detective stories, Waugh said that Knox “regarded these books, as he did his acrostics, as intellectual exercises, a game between writer and reader in which a problem was precisely stated and elaborately disguised. He was not seeking to write novels.” Thus the characterization was thin.

    “At the time,” said Waugh, “there was a limited but eager public for these puzzles. Fashion has turned from them, as from acrostics. … None was more ingenious than [Knox], more scrupulous in the provision of clues, more logically complete in his solutions. Very few women have ever enjoyed them.”

    In some quarters Knox is best remembered as the last man to have translated the whole of the Bible into English by himself. His edition appeared about 70 years ago and remains in print. Before Vatican II it was an official version for use in the dioceses of England and Wales. I find it the most pleasing modern translation.

    I can’t track down the exact quotation at the moment, but it may have been Waugh who said that Knox’s tombstone could have read something like this:

    “Here Lies Rev. Msgr. Ronald A. Knox, Translator of Holy Scripture and Author of The Viaduct Murder.”

    (By the way, I was the editor of a collection of little-known Knox pieces called “The Lost Works of Ronald Knox.”)

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