Time to Be in Earnest Read Online Free PDF

is, after all, one way in which we can cope with violent death, fictionalize it, give it a recognizable shape and, at the end of the book, show that even the most intractable mystery is capable of solution, not by supernatural means or by good fortune, but by human intelligence, human perseverance, and human courage.
    I’ve been considering the question since my return home. According to Julian Symons in his book
Bloody Murder
, the first authentic note of the detective story proper was struck as early as 1794 in the novel
Caleb Williams
. Not surprisingly this is by a man, William Godwin, Shelley’s father-in-law. Certainly this novel has many of the elements of classical detection: a central mystery, physical clues, an amateur detective, a pursuit and disguise. It even foreshadows the use of this formulaic genre to say something about society which the author regards as important. As the intellectual leader of the English radical movement, Godwin believed in an ideal anarchy in which there would be no crime, no administration and no government. Hazlitt said that, once begun, it was a novel impossible to put down. Personally I find it unreadable.
    I suppose most readers would award the distinction of being the first modern detective story to
The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins, published in 1868, and again by a man. In my view no other single novel more clearly adumbrates the later development of the genre. Wilkie Collins created one of the earliest fictional police detectives, Sergeant Cuff, eccentric but professional, shrewdly knowledgeable about human nature, and based on the real-life Scotland Yard detective Jonathan Whicher. Collins is meticulously accurate in his treatment of medical and forensic details, there is an emphasis on the importance of physical clues, and all the clues—a paint-stained nightdress, a smeared door, a metal chain—are made available to the reader, foreshadowing the traditionof the fair-play rule whereby the detective must never be in possession of more information than is the reader. The clever shifting of suspicion from one character to another is done with great adroitness, and this emphasis on physical evidence and the cunning manipulation of the reader were both to become common. But the novel has other more important virtues as a detective story. Wilkie Collins is excellent at describing the physical appearance and the atmosphere of the setting and makes good use of the contrast between the secure and prosperous Verinder household and the eerie loneliness of the shivering sands, between the exotic and accursed jewel which is stolen, and the outwardly respectable privileged lives of upper-class Victorians.
    But
The Moonstone
is a single book; I suppose that the credit for having, as it were, invented the detective story and laying down its main conventions has to be shared between two writers, and again both of them are male. It can be argued that, in five tales alone, Edgar Allan Poe anticipated virtually every type of succeeding detective story. The sensational thriller in
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
(1841), the treatment of a real-life crime combined with meticulous deduction in
The Mystery of Marie Roget
(1842), the tale of a secret agent in
The Purloined Letter
(1844), a puzzle revolving round the breaking of a code in
The Gold Bug
(1842) and a murder mystery solved by the narrator in
Thou Art the Man
(1844). Poe’s detective, Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, is an early example of the cerebral detective, a man who solves crimes not by acts of egregious bravery or spectacular cunning, but by observation and reason.
    But if the detective story was born in the United States, one could argue that it came of age in Victorian England. Conan Doyle is the creator of the most famous detective in literature. He bequeathed to the genre a respect for reason, a reliance on ratiocination rather than on physical force, an abhorrence of sentimentality and the power to create an atmosphere of mystery and