4
Many thanks to my family, always a precious support, to Grandma Vittoria, to Luca special
thanks. Besides, I want to thank Tecla and Maria Luisa of the Sherlockian in Milan and
everybody writing, reading and thinking as a “detective”.
5
First part: THE DETECTIVE STORY
6
CHAPTER 1 – HISTORY OF THE DETECTIVE STORY: FROM THE ORGINS TO THE DARK
WORLD OF NOIR
1.1 The origins, Edgar Allan Poe, the birth of the modern police
In outlining a history of the detective story, there have been many attempts to identify its
archetypes in various works of the literary tradition. There are many who see the first example
of detective story in Sophocle’s Oedipus the King
1
,in which the king tries to identify the culprit
for the murder of his father questioning various witnesses, to discover that he himself is the
criminal he is looking for
2
. Others indicate the exposition of the investigational method
contained in the Book of Daniel in the Bible
3
as a prototype of the detective story. There are
also references to the Greek tradition and to Homer’s Odyssey
4
, where Ulysses is able to
sidetrack the giant Poliphemus covering himself with goatskin, to the oriental tradition and the
tales of the One Thousand and One Nights
5
, in which it is frequent to find the theme of a
beautiful woman succeeding in swindling secrets through various tricks and that of clever
thieves’ tricks. Even in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
6
, in which the prince of Denmark tries to make
his uncle, whom he believes to be the culprit, to confess through various tricks, can be found,
according to some, the ancestor of all detectives. The most famous among the forerunners of
the investigational method based on the observation of clues is no doubt Voltaire’s Zadig, in
which the main character succeeds in perfectly describing the king’s little female dog and horse
disappeared from the court basing himself on the observation of traces and details and saving
himself from death penalty only finding them while he is in prison.
No doubt that in these works there are some of the fundamental aspects characterizing the
detective story: investigations, tricks to unmask crimes and swindle revelations, sharp
deductions and reasoning based on observation, but they are not sufficient to be considered
authentic ancestors of the kind of literature under examination.
We have to wait until Enlightenment in order to see the favourable premises for the
development of the detective story. In that period, in fact, there is an increase in the number
of readers, scientific popularization ad exaltation of reason and the public pay more and more
attention to criminality and justice. Besides, a new sensibility to mystery develops, producing a
sort of anxiety, of anguish. This mood is one of the main characteristics of the gothic novel
7
,
one of the characterizing themes of the detective story together with the picaresque novel of
the Spanish tradition (a narration of the adventures that street criminals experiment to
survive) and of the huge memories writing of crimes and criminals
8
.
In reality, what characterizes and marks the detective story, beyond its contents, is the
structure of the narration itself, based on the contrast between the starting appearance of
things and the final revelation of their real essence, to which one progressively arrives through
a logical process of deduction
9
. The first work joining in itself themes and structure typical of
the genre which is called “detective story” is The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan
Poe (1809-1849), published in 1841, the year in which conventionally is put the birth of the
detective story itself. The American poet unites the themes of previous and contemporary
culture into a new structure, constituting the classical pattern of the detection story: there is a
1
Among the various scholars seeing in Oedipus the King an archaic form of detective story we remember the French
authors Boileau and Narcejac.
2
Stefano Benvenuti and Gianni Tizzoni, Il romanzo giallo. Storia, autori, personaggi, Milano, Arnoldo Mondatori ed.,
1979, p. 11
3
Alberto del Monte, Breve storia del romanzo poliziesco, Bari, Laterza, 1962, pp. 25-26
4
Ernesto G. Laura, Storia del giallo da Poe a Borges, Roma, Nuova Universale Studium, 1981, p. 14
5
Alberto del Monte, op. cit., pp. 23-24
6
Ernesto G. Laura, op. cit., p. 14
7
The gothic novel (or novel of terror), expression of the irrationalist element of the Enlightenment, was born with the
publication of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole in 1764; the best exponent of the gothic novel is Ann Radcliffe.
At the beginning, mysteries contained in this kind of narration are “rationalized”, that is to say terror disappears with
the discovery of a rational explanation hiding behind the enigma. Afterwards, the terrifying element prevails, as in the
following horror novel (ghost novel).
8
Alberto del Monte, op. cit., pp. 30-31
9
Ernesto G. Laura, op. cit., p. 16
7
starting problem, a mystery which is apparently inexplicable, to which a first superficial
solution is given; then, one makes a careful and rational observation of the facts and of the
clues provoking a moment of confusion; the next step is to eliminate all possible explanations
until one obtains, by elimination, the solution of the starting enigma. The rational method wins
on the apparent irrationality of the mystery, which is discovered with no recourse to
supernatural, as it happened in the gothic novel
10
.
It is interesting to underline how, in the detective story, one never lingers on the cruelty of the
crime: either a murder or other, neither is it the essential matter of the narration, nor does it
arise a particular impression in the main characters. Just because the detective story
gravitates round the solution of a crime through an investigational process, it is not given a
great importance to the enigma and the characters, except for the main character, the
detective, the person who solves the mystery, restoring the order, and embodies the reason
11
.
With the final explanation of the mystery, the superiority of the amateur detective on the
police is affirmed and his reason is exalted, celebrating him also for the contraposition to a less
sharp observer, in whom the reader can identify himself. The detective who is the main
character of The Murders of the Rue Morgue and of the two following stories of the same
author belonging to the detective story, The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842) and The Purloined
Letter (1845), is the gentleman C. Auguste Dupin, the character of romantic genesis (we know
he is of a noble family in poverty), lonely, eccentric, decadent, with a sharp reason and a
genial intuition, two talents marking and alienating him from society. Monsieur Dupin appears
in the first story in a moment of slackness of the police who, after having performed all the
procedures provided, are not able to identify the culprit of the murder of a girl found dead in a
room locked from within and of her mother, whose body is found not far from her. Dupin, who
had followed the fact reading the news in the paper, examines the place of the crime and after
he closes himself up into a silent reasoning, that we can follow step by step guided by the
narrator, at the end of which he arrives to the logical solution of the double murder
12
.
We don’t know if the police would have ever been able to solve the enigma; however, a
negative representation of the police is common in the first examples of the detective story
and reflects the distrust (sometimes even hostility) of the XIX-century society towards them
13
.
In Paris, the city chosen by Poe to set his stories, the police were in that period a quite recent
invention, created by Napoleon with a law in 1800. Policemen were not loved and to refer to
them, people used the expression mouche, sneak. An exception was Vidocq, a famous criminal
then turned to the law becoming, in 1811, the Head of the Sûreté, the first special corp for
criminal investigation. Even being a mouche, Vidocq was well-liked by society, who, instead,
admired his deeds and his Mémoirs, published in 1828, obtained a great success.
Paradoxically, the fact he was well-liked was due to his irregular past, to his being at the
borders of society and then nearer to common people
14
.
Vidocq starts that conflict between police and detective which is typical of the detective story
and which is to be already found since Poe (whose knowledge of the Mémoirs is certain).
However, it is Monsieur Dupin himself the prototype of the detective from whom all amateur
investigators, main characters of following works, come, from Sherlock Holmes to Lecoq, from
Philo Vance to Philip Marlowe, and their creators are all debtors, as to concern the
development of the narration, to that process of rational investigation put into his stories by
the tormented and genial Poe
15
.
10
Stefano Benvenuti and Gianni Tizzoni, op. cit., p. 15-19
11
Ernest G. Laura, op. cit., pp. 20-21
12
Edgar Allan Poe, Gli assassinii della Rue Morgue, Milano, Club degli Editori, 1973
13
Ernest Mandel, Delitti per diletto, Interno Giallo, Milano, 1990, pp. 25-26
14
Alberto del Monte, op. cit., pp. 49-52
15
Carlo Oliva, Storia Sociale del Giallo, Lugano, Todaro Editore, 2003, p. 14-15
8
1.2 From Feuilleton to Novel
At about the half of the XIX century in Europe a new kind of publication was born, doomed to
largely affect the story of the detective genre: the instalment novel. The first countries in
which it appeared were England, where it was attached to periodicals, and France, as an
insertion in newspapers.
For many years, in England the most spread kind of novel had been the historical novel (such
as Ivanhoe by Walter Scott), published in three volumes, threedecker, finely bound and sold at
an undoubtedly high price. The high price limited its public of readers to rich classes, even if
the lower classes showed cultural interests
16
.
In order to make reading more accessible and less elitist, reprints of novels began to be
published in less careful editions and with a more approachable standard price. Other
publishers, addressing to a much wider but less educated public, began to publish unpublished
works always with a lower price than threedeckers’ one. A lot of success was won by stories of
crimes and bandits
17
, which would have been also the main themes of the detective story.
In 1841 there was the publication of novels in weekly instalments, the so-called penny
dreadfuls. Periodicals too, given the great success of this kind of publications, started to host
in their pages instalment novels which, afterwards, were collected in a volume
18
.
A master of the instalment novel was Charles Dickens (1812-1870), who, due to his skill and
his name, gave a certain prestige to instalment publications and made his brotherly friend
William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) to leave the profession of lawyer and devote himself to
writing.
19
We have to thank Dickens if the detective story passed from the short story to novel, because
it was Wilkie Collins that made this passage for the first time with The Moonstone, published in
1868 on All the year around, the newspaper directed by Dickens
20
. In this work, the main
character is not an amateur detective solving enigmas as a hobby, like Dupin, but a police
officer, Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard, whose profession is to find a solution to crimes. In the
novel, unanimously recognised as Collins’s masterpiece, the sergeant is looking for the thief of
a very precious diamond, the moonstone. He appears much more humane and less unerring
than Dupin and it is not the detection what attracts the attention of the reader, as it happens
in Poe’s stories, but rather the mystery, the whodunit
21
.
A dire il vero, la soluzione elaborata dal Collins, quando alla fine ci si arriva, è talmente
intricata e inverosimile che lasciarsela sfuggire, per un investigatore serio, dovrebbe
essere motivo più di elogio che di censura. [...] Di fatto, quest’opera ineguale, che sul
lettore contemporaneo finisce sempre con il produrre una vaga sensazione di noia,
rappresenta una pietra miliare per l’evoluzione del poliziesco nei paesi di lingua inglese.
22
The development of the instalment novel in France was different and original. Since 1800, a
paper of literary, artistic and cultural supplement was already attached to newspapers, the so-
called feuilleton, which, since 1830, began to host also stories and then novels, causing the
birth of a new literary phenomenon, the roman feuilleton. Appearing on daily newspapers, the
interval between an episode and the following was short, the level of involvement was high,
the public of readers was wide and made of people of various cultural levels.
At the beginning, there was no decrease in the literary quality; also Dumas and Balzac wrote
novels for instalment publication. Afterwards, instead, the commercial aspect prevailed and the
feuilleton tried to adapt more and more to the public’s tastes and sometimes fancies. Authors
were obliged to totally unlikely literary tricks, such as the resurrection of a character, whose
16
Alberto del Monte, op. cit., pp. 84-85
17
Books containing stories of criminals and their deeds were called blue books.
18
Maria Luisa Astaldi, Nuove letture inglesi, Firenze, Sansoni, 1958
19
Ernesto G. Laura, op. cit., p. 42-43
20
Stefano Benvenuti and Gianni Tizzoni, cit. work, p. 24
21
Contraction of Who Done It, expression used to indicate the novel with enigmas, with an evident reference to the
culprit of the crime.
22
Carlo Oliva, op. cit., p. 27
9
death readers don’t accept
23
. It is the case of Rocambole by Ponson du Terrail, passed from
wicked criminal to protector of oppressed, resurrected after a vitriol death
24
.
Some instalment novels contained elements typical of the detective story: murders, crimes,
thefts, whose culprits were not discovered in the end as a solution of a rational investigation.
They were put in for the tragicalness of the narration, typical of the roman feuilleton.
It is with Emile Gaboriau (1832-1873) that the detective story explicitly appears among the
instalment publications of the feuilleton, with L’Affaire Lerouge, published in 1863 in Le Pays,
in 1865 in Le Soleil and finally in 1866 in a volume. In this work, the hero by Gaboriau,
Monsieur Lecoq, makes his first appearance and from his name it is possible to guess that the
character will be, in some aspects, similar to Vidocq. He, too, in fact is a repentant criminal:
Lecoq ha una mentalità decisamente criminale per cui potrebbe commettere dei crimini
perfetti e che gli fa pertanto comprendere i criminali e scoprire i loro delitti. Ma egli è un
uomo onesto con una mentalità criminale: ha posto questa sua segreta natura al servizio
della giustizia
25
.
His profile changes during the various novels of which he is the main character besides
L’Affaire Lerouge: Le Crime d’Orcival, Le dossier n. 113 and Monsieur Lecoq. In Lecoq there is
also something of Dupin: he has a noble origin, he acts alone, he uses a pseudo-scientific
vocabulary, but differently from Poe’s detective, who loses himself into his reasoning,
Gaboriau’s policeman detective collects each possible clue, examines each circumstance and
detail, looking for connections and hidden meanings, proceeds with investigations more than
intuitions
26
. In the end, he unmasks as murderer a person who was before beyond suspicion,
causing in the reader an emotional, not only an intellectual, wonder
27
.
In the structure of Gaboriau’s novels, their birth as instalment publication is well visible: the
first part with the narration of the crime, the investigation and the reasoning of the detective is
interrupted by the insertion of a second part, in which the events leading to the crime are
explained. In the end, there is a connection to the first part followed by the conclusion. This
device was useful to keep the public’s attention between an episode and the following and to
stimulate curiosity, avoiding confusion and boredom.
Gaboriau obtained a great success also in USA and England. It is said that sir Arthur Conan
Doyle was spurred to compete in the detective story because he read L’Affaire Lerouge
28
.
23
Alberto del Monte, op. cit., pp. 74-77, 81
24
It is not surprising that the Italian adjective “rocambolesco” (“extraordinary”), used to indicate something amazing
and incredible, derives from this character.
25
Alberto del Monte, op. cit., p. 99
26
Stefano Benvenuti and Gianni Tizzoni, op. cit., pp. 20-23
27
Ernest Mandel, op. cit., pp. 33
28
Ernesto G. Laura, op. cit., p. 59
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