Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s Read online

  In England, criminals and detectives peopled Charles Dickens’s tales as well. While not usually considered an author of crime fiction, Dickens created Inspector Bucket, the first important detective in English literature. When Bucket appeared, in Bleak House (1852–53), he became the model police officer: honest, diligent, and confident, but a touch dull. Wilkie Collins, author of two of the greatest novels of suspense of the nineteenth century, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), contributed a similar character, Sergeant Cuff, who appears in The Moonstone. Cuff is known as the finest police detective in England, a man who solves his cases energetically but with no hint of genius. Sadly, after The Moonstone, he is not heard from again. In each case, however, the detective is too late to help any of the affected persons.

  In 1866–67, The Dead Letter: An American Romance, the first crime novel written by an American woman—some call it the first crime novel written by an American—was published. Its author was Metta Victoria Fuller Victor (1831–85), writing under the name Seely Regester. Victor had written dozens of works and would continue to write others, including novels, short stories, dime novels, poetry, and housewives’ manuals that included boys’ adventures, westerns, juvenile fiction, and humor. She also wrote two other tales under the name Seely Regester, a novel titled The Figure Eight; or, The Mystery of Meredith Place (serialized in The Illuminated Western World, 1869) and “The Skeleton at the Banquet.”2 All of these featured detectives. In The Dead Letter, there is both a police detective, Mr. Burton, and an amateur, Richard Redfield (who is training to be a lawyer). In The Figure Eight and “The Skeleton at the Banquet,” the detectives are amateurs. The Dead Letter was published both as a serial dime novel and in book form, and it was successful enough to be pirated by Cassell’s Magazine and reprinted in England in 1866–67.

  With the exception of Edgar Allan Poe, Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935) is the best-known American writer of mystery fiction before the twentieth century. Michael Sims credits Green as the first woman to write a “full-fledged” detective novel, discounting Victor’s The Dead Letter as dependent on the psychic visions of the detective’s young daughter, “thus rejecting the underlying rational basis of detection.”3 Green, the daughter of a lawyer, wrote The Leavenworth Case (featuring New York police detective Ebenezer Gryce) after college, though it was not published until 1878. It was an instant bestseller and continues to be hailed as an exemplar of the pitfalls of circumstantial evidence. The book’s success led to Green writing another twenty-eight mystery novels, countless short stories, and books in other genres. Though Gryce was the lead detective in three novels, it was the character of Amelia Butterworth, a nosy society spinster, that was Green’s greatest innovation. Butterworth was undoubtedly the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. Green also can be creditied as inspiring the Nancy Drew series of girls’ mysteries: Her young society debutante, Violet Strange, appeared in a series of nine stories, solving crimes in order to earn enough money to support a disinherited sister.

  It was the appearance of Sherlock Holmes in 1887 and the enormous success of the detective in a series of novels and stories by Arthur Conan Doyle that appeared between 1890 and 1927 that changed the entire course of the stream of crime fiction. With the limited exception of Dupin, previous crime fiction focused mainly on characters investigating their own mysteries (or those of family members or friends) or official police investigators. With the success of the Holmes canon, the private investigator became the central figure, seemingly the more eccentric the better. When Conan Doyle took a break from writing Holmes stories between 1893 and 1901, dozens rushed to fill the vacuum. At one extreme might be placed the American Jacques Futrelle’s “The Thinking Machine,” a virtually faceless Holmes substitute; at another extreme is the Englishman Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, in many respects the opposite of Holmes. American crime writers were no exception. Though their work had some unique merits, their characters were largely copies of Sherlock Holmes. The more noteworthy include Samuel Hopkins Adams’s Average Jones, an “advertising advisor” living in the Cosmic Club and Arthur B. Reeve’s Professor Craig Kennedy, a Columbia University chemist once hailed as the “American Sherlock Holmes.” Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner, a West Virginia backwoodsman, was as unlike Holmes as imaginable!4

  Not to be overlooked is the work of one of the earliest American “Sherlockians,” Carolyn Wells (1870–1942), who wrote more than 170 books of crime fiction, parodies, and humorous verse, including sixty-one titles about a detective named Fleming Stone. Wells was an important critic as well: She published the first edition of her The Technique of the Mystery Story: A Complete Practical Study of the Theory and Structure of the Form with Examlples from the Best Mystery Writers in 1913 and founded the American series of the “year’s best mystery stories” in 1931. A devoted student of crime fiction, she noted—well before Dorothy Sayers would make the same point in the introduction to her monumental 1931 anthology The Omnibus of Crime—the classical origins of crime writing, from Herodotus through the Bible, from the Arabian Nights to Voltaire’s Zadig. Wells hailed the “stirring mental exercise” of writers like Gaston Leroux, Jacque Futrelle, Arthur Reeve, Anna Katharine Green, and the Baroness Orczy and was well aware of the many contributions of women to the genre, including those of Augusta Groner and Mary Wilkins Freeman. At least one critic believes that her book may well have influenced the early work of both Agatha Christie and the American Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958).5

  Rinehart’s 1908 novel The Circular Staircase was the fountainhead of an enormous body of modern American crime fiction.6 Rinehart acknowledged Anna Katharine Green as her direct ancestor: When selecting a publisher to which to submit The Circular Staircase, Rinehart recalled that she merely looked at who had published Green’s latest work. Her career spanned fifty years, and thriller-writer Edgar Wallace called her “the queen of us all.” She wrote more than fifty books, a half-dozen plays, and hundreds of short stories. Yet she is little remembered today, except as the founder of the “had-I-but-known” school of mysteries. Rinehart did not view herself to be a writer of “detective” stories, and indeed—despite being christened the “American Agatha Christie”—with minor exceptions,7 she tended not to create larger-than-life characters such as Poirot and Marple. Like many writers of the day, she broke in writing short stories for magazines. The Circular Staircase was itself serialized, and this model was followed by Earl Derr Biggers with The House Without a Key.

  While critics may argue over the exact parameters of the “Golden Age” of crime fiction, most place its beginning between 1908 and 1918 and sweep into its early pantheon writers such as Conan Doyle, E. C. Bentley, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, H. C. Bailey, Margery Allingham, and Josephine Tey—all notably English. All espoused the clue-based mystery, presenting puzzles for the readers to solve. After Anna Katharine Green, and with the sole exception of Mary Roberts Rinehart, no Americans achieved any fame until S. S. Van Dine, discussed below.8 As crime fiction historian Howard Haycraft, writing in 1942, put it: “[No American author] was doing work to compare with the exciting developments that were taking place in England. The American detective story stood still, exactly where it had been before the War.”9

  Earl Derr Biggers, ca. 1912

  Earl Derr Biggers (1884–1933) was the first to buck that tide. A graduate of Harvard University, he would not have seemed a likely candidate to reinvigorate American crime fiction. He began his career as a journalist for the Boston Traveler, writing humorous columns and theatrical criticism. In 1913, however, he tried his hand at a mystery novel, Seven Keys to Baldpate, which won an immediate following and became an immensely successful stage play, starring George M. Cohan, was filmed seven times, and was adapted for radio and television. Several other of his novels published in the 1910s also had elements of mystery. Biggers also wrote a stream of short stories between 1913 and 1920 for The Saturday Evening Post, The American Magazine, an
d Ladies’ Home Journal, though none were of any particular note.

  For decades, the Chinese had been reviled in popular culture, especially in America. As early as 1880, P. W. Dooner wrote a little-known novel titled Last Days of the Republic, published in California—a hotbed of anti-Asian sentiment—depicting a United States under Chinese rule. The evil Oriental genius first appeared in Western literature in 1892. Tom Edison Jr.’s Electric Sea Spider, or, The Wizard of the Submarine World, a “dime novel” published by the Nugget Library, features Kiang Ho, a Mongolian or Chinese (there is some confusion in the tale) Harvard-educated pirate-warlord. Ho, defeated by young Edison, was succeeded in 1896 by Yue-Laou, an evil Chinese sorcerer-ruler featured in The Maker of Moons series by the American writer Robert Chambers.

  In 1898, English novelist M. P. Shiel wrote his most popular book, The Yellow Danger. The story tells of Dr. Yen How, who is half-Japanese/half-Chinese (“he combined these antagonistic races in one man”) and rises to power in China and fosters war with the West. Yen How is described as a physician educated at Heidelberg and was probably loosely based on the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen (also a physician). Yen How is defeated by the West in the person of Admiral John Hardy, a consumptive who overcomes his frailties to turn back the Yellow Danger.

  Sax Rohmer’s short story “The Zayat Kiss” appeared in October 1912 in The Story-Teller, a popular magazine. It was well-received, and Rohmer wrote nine more stories in the initial series. In 1913, the series was collected in book form as The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu (published as The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu in America). Fu Manchu appeared in two more series of stories before the end of the Great War, collected as The Devil Doctor (1916) (The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu in America) and Si-Fan Mysteries (1917) (The Hand of Fu Manchu in America).

  By 1924, anti-Asian sentiments were at their peak when, with overwhelming support, the United States Congress passed, and President Calvin Coolidge signed, the Immigration Act (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act). The new law adopted the concept of national-origin quotas, limiting overall immigration to 150,000 persons per year, restricting immigration to 2 percent of the quantity of those nationals already present in the United States (according to the 1890 census), and completely prohibiting the immigration of those ineligible for U.S. citizenship. This last standard effectively barred half the world’s population and lumped Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Thais, Indonesians, and others into the category of “Asiatic.” Those Asiatics already living in the United States would be barred from citizenship and prevented from bringing other family members into the country.

  In 1920, after exhausting himself with work on some very successful stage plays, Biggers traveled to Honolulu. He continued to write a variety of short stories having nothing to do with Hawaii, but he was apparently fascinated by the melting pot that was 1920s Honolulu. He conceived of a mystery set there, and in 1922 he described the work-in-progress to his editor as including “army people, traders, planters. An Americanized Chinese house boy—the star pitcher on the All-China baseball nine—the lawyer for the opium ring—an Admiral of the Fleet . . .—an old Yankee from New Bedford—a champion Hawaiian swimmer—beachcombers—. . . the president of a Japanese bank.”10 There was no mention of a detective. According to Biggers, in the summer of 1924, he stopped by the New York Public Library Reading Room, and while browsing through Hawaiian newspapers, he found an account of the Honolulu police. “In an obscure corner of an inside page, I found an item to the effect that a certain hapless Chinese, being too fond of opium, had been arrested by Sergeants Chang Apana and Lee Fook, of the Honolulu Police. So Sergeant Charlie Chan entered the story of The House Without a Key.”11

  Detective Chang Apana, ca. 1930

  Biggers was no racial crusader, and he certainly had no intention of creating a Chinese character who would fly in the face of American stereotypes or alter the public view of foreigners. Chan is decidedly different: He is described as a fat man, with the chubby cheeks of a baby; yet he walks with the dainty step of a woman. He has ivory skin, short black hair, and amber slanted eyes. He does not speak pidgin-English (as do several of the Japanese characters in the book); rather, he speaks his own brand of English, replete with aphorisms. In this respect, he is as foreign as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, whose speech is as distinctive as Chan’s. Chan also regularly displays his animosity toward the Japanese—a sentiment common in Hawaii in the 1920s and throughout America. In The House Without a Key, though he eventually appreciates Chan’s talents, the young Bostonian protagonist cannot erase his sense of a marked gulf between Chan and himself. In this, Biggers accurately reflected the realities facing the American people: Notwithstanding harsh policies such as the Immigration Act, the ethnic populations of America were here to stay.

  First serialized in The Saturday Evening Post between January 24 and March 7, 1925, the adventures of Charlie Chan struck a chord with the Post’s readership. Here, at last, was an American crime writer worth reading, even if his tales were of a slightly less-than-American detective. The book publication of The House Without a Key occurred later in 1925, and over the next seven years, five more Chan novels appeared (all first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post): The Chinese Parrot (1926), Behind the Curtain (1928), The Black Camel (1929), Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), and Keeper of the Keys (1932). The novels were extremely popular and were adapted into films, cartoons, comic strips, and radio programs.12 The last Chan film was in 1947, and a cartoon series ran in 1972–73.

  Earl Derr Biggers on the set of an early Chan film

  Howard Haycraft, in his masterful Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (1941), summed up the stories of the Chan series: “They are clean, humorous, unpretentious, more than a little romantic, and—it must be confessed—just a shade mechanical and old fashioned by modern plot standards. This absence of any novel or startling departure, in fact, is probably the reason that the first Chan story created no such popular or critical stir as the first Philo Vance case . . . and it was not until two or three of his adventures had appeared that he struck full stride. Once started, however, he has been difficult to stop. . . . Conventional as the narratives often were, Charlie Chan’s personal popularity played a part in the Renaissance of the American detective story that can not be ignored.”13

  S. S. Van Dine with William Powell, who played Philo Vance, in a publicity photo for The Canary Murder Case, 1931

  S. S. Van Dine, late 1920s

  By 1930, declared J. K. Van Dover, “Philo Vance was the American detective.”14 S. S. Van Dine’s books were consistent successes until, after publication of The Scarab Murder Case in 1930, the inevitable decline began. Who was this American phenomenon, the subject of twelve novels and seventeen films, yet barely remembered today? Between 1923 and 1924, Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939), former editor of The Smart Set and a well-regarded art critic, became ill and read widely in crime fiction.15 Determined to make his fortune at fiction but anxious to preserve his “high-brow” reputation,16 he adopted the pseudonym “S. S. Van Dine” (based, he said, probably facetiously, on an old family name and the convenient initials of a steamship). He conceived of the central figure and three plots, summarized them, and presented them to the acclaimed editor Maxwell Perkins, whose other authors included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and John P. Marquand. Perkins was impressed and immediately bought them for the Scribner’s house. The rest was publishing history.

  Cover, Scribner’s Magazine (May 1927), depicting Philo Vance (for The Canary Murder Case)

  Van Dine had devised his own “rules”17 for crime fiction and set out to create a detective with a unique style. Some suggest that the character was intended to out-Holmes Holmes, with a deeper erudition and knowledge of useful trivia. A more likely model is Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, complete with the affected speech of an upper-class Englishman, a pince-nez, a robust collection of wine and modern art, and a butler. In either case, Phil
o Vance was established as a New York bachelor, with an inherited fortune and the taste to spend it wisely. Accompanied by his attorney, himself “S. S. Van Dine,” Vance partnered with New York District Attorney John F.-X. Markham to solve murders—and only murders. The Vance novels are long by the standards of Agatha Christie and are paced slowly, and they include numerous details about the panoply of suspects and the settings.

  Vance insists that physical evidence is of much less importance than understanding “the exact psychological nature of the deed.” He maintains that understanding the deep-seated urges of seemingly respectable individuals and recognizing their unique psychological signatures is enough to identify a murderer. Vance frequently makes fun of Markham and the police for the logical conclusions they draw from “clues” and circumstantial evidence. Yet despite Van Dine’s ignorance of ballistics and other burgeoning forensic sciences and Vance’s disdain for police investigations, there are masses of physical evidence in each book; in The Benson Murder Case, for example, Vance relies heavily on tracing the path of the murderous bullet to demonstrate the height of the killer as well as astutely reasoning out the killer’s hiding place for the murder weapon.