Fri 7 Nov 2014
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: T. J. BINYON – Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction.
Posted by Steve under Reference works / Biographies , Reviews[4] Comments
William F. Deeck
T. J. BINYON – Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. Oxford University Press, hardcover, 1989; softcover, 1990.
Though I find it both distressing and difficult, I will refrain, for the most part, from criticizing Mr. Binyon’s book on the basis of what I would have written had I not been incompetent and indolent and had I written a reference work of this sort.
Mr. Binyon’s intent — he achieves his goal — is to present a selective history not of the genre but of the genre’s principal character: the detective. He posits three main classes:
Despite its deficiencies, this classification, amplified by further subdivisions and with the addition of a final section on historical and comic detective stories and on criminals as heroes, provides the basic structure of this book. The categories are not sacrosanct, however; similar characters in different categories can be brought together, and connections across classes are made, where useful.
Under the Professional Amateur, Mr. Binyon subdivides by various categories: Sherlock Holmes and the Magazine Short Story, Holmes’s First Successors, Dr. Thorndyke, Law, Medicine, Journalism, The Private Detective: 1920 to the Present, The Private Eye from Williams to Warshawski, etc.
For the Amateur Amateur, there are such classifications as Priests, Missionaries, and Rabbis, The Theatre, Husbands and Wives, and Finance. Within the Police category can be found Inspector French, Younger Policemen, More Cultured Policemen, and the Amateur Professional.
In his necessarily subjective judgments for placement in the various categories, I found nothing with which to argue. Quibble, yes, that goes without saying. Of course, I did take issue with some of his judgments about quality. For example, Mr. Binyon finds Nancy Spain’s novels quite amusing, where-as I have never detected any humor in them.
Most shocking to my mind, he gives the Lockridges’ Mr. and Mrs. North novels short shrift. When Mr. Binyon prefers Lynn Brock’s Colonel Gore over Philip MacDonald’s Col. Anthony Gethryn, one can but gape. Judging Ellery Queen, as he appears to do, on the first dozen books isn’t quite fair play.
Still, if there is a weakness in the book, which there isn’t, it is that in many cases Mr. Binyon mentions a book or a series but fails to make a judgment, even misguided, on quality.
For errors, I noted but two: Erle Stanley Gardner’s first name is spelled Earle the two times it is used. Sara Woods’s Antony Maitland is said to have a game leg rather than a bad right arm. Of course, there’s the curious sentence, probably the handiwork of a clumsy copy editor, that ! took some while to figure out- as you know, I’m a bit slow: “After Priestly the curious view — implicit in both Futrelle’s stories and Rhode’s early books — that logic is the prerogative of the scientist’s lapses….” Well, I guess I figured it out.
Writing about the Amateur Amateur, Mr. Binyon says he “is usually as amiable — and occasionally appears as foolish — as [Bertie] Wooster; but the foolishness is only a mask, concealing a keen brain and an iron will.” As I have demonstrated, more or less, in another review, it is P.G. Wodehouse’s Psmith to whom these gentlemen should be compared, not the mentally negligible Wooster.
In the first paragraph of this review, I said I would refrain “for the most part” from criticizing Mr. Binyon for what was not included in his survey. At this point I must state that any discussion of Crooks and Villains series is woefully incomplete without a mention of Frank McAuliffe’s Augustus Mandrel[ and Kyril Bonfiglioli’s Charlie Mortdecai.
Authorities on the genre may not learn anything new from Murder Will Out. Luckily, such paragons aren’t numerous, and I am not among their number, so I both enjoyed Mr. Binyon’s book, well written and witty, and furthered my knowledge of the genre. Moreover, his remarks about Peter Antony’s novels have started me off on another author hunt that will also include Mr. Binyon’s two crime novels, Swan Song and Greek Gifts.
November 7th, 2014 at 2:29 pm
This is a book that I seem to have missed altogether, though perhaps I knew about it at the time it was published, and it slipped my mind until now.
Even though it’s a quarter of a century out of date now, I was intrigued enough by Binyon’s approach and Bill’s comments to find a copy online and buy it. (Ten dollars for a one in Fine condition, in Jacket.)
It’s a slim book, though, only 176 pages long, so I can’t imagine many authors getting anything but the briefest of comments.
November 7th, 2014 at 4:05 pm
I had even more arguments with this one than Bill did, finding that Binyon tackled far too much in far too little space. I can think of a dozen better and better researched books on the genre with deeper insight and far more understanding I could have spent my money on.
For instance placing the private eye under the professional amateur was to me a major misunderstanding of the genre, especially as many of the writers in the genre were taking specific aim at the amateur detective as an absurd creation.
Nor, would I think, could anyone consider Dr. Thorndyke in any sense an amateur. He is not a professional detective as in a policeman, but his relationship with the Yard and the law is not the least amateurish.
Anyway, Col. Gore over Anthony Gethryn? What was he drinking? There is a point when personal preference calls into question critical judgment.
Sadly most critics give the Lockridge’s and North’s the same short shrift, likely because the novels are heavy on suspense, and despite the fact that Pam is no mean detective though a lateral thinker of the first water.
I certainly agree with Bill on Psmith, though I would point out the silly ass hero was probably equally the responsibility of Sapper and Bulldog Drummond, a champion blatherer. Allingham’s early Campion’s are more likely satirical jabs at Drummond as much as imitations of Wodehouse. Even the early Saint blathers a bit in the Drummond manner, just with considerable more cleverness. Beyond that it was a fairly common tactic in literature before Wodehouse brought it to a fine art and there are no end of blathering young idiots to blame the genre on even before Psmith and Wodehouse. The entire silly ass genre in and out of popular fiction was a reaction to the horrors of WWI — something that could be gleaned from any of Sayer’s insightful Wimsey novels that do everything but spell it out.
This was my problem with Binyon, I found this to be a somewhat shallow and facile graduate thesis when I was hoping for a well researched and thought out doctoral dissertation. He has no historical insight to offer as to why certain genres sprang forth at certain times, why Holmes, why Raffles, why Lupin, why the private eye, why the police novel? He seems to see them as semi spontaneous rather than arising out of the cultural and historical era they occur in. He seems to see them as occurring in a vacuum of popular literature whereas their import is often because of the exact time and place they appeared; late Victorian England, Post WWI America, Post WWII etc. Each era gets the detective it is ready for whether it is Sherlock Holmes or Mike Hammer. Without understanding the historical perspective it all seems rather random and accidental, where in fact the genres he describes were born out of specific needs and desires of those audiences. Why did audiences suddenly grasp Holmes to their bosom in 1892 when they had not in 1887 when he first appeared?
At heart Binyon’s book is sadly lacking in historical and critical insight. A critic tells you not that he liked something but why and in what context that like comes from. Rather than waste time on this one go back and reread Symons MORTAL CONSEQUNCES, I certainly disagreed with him on many things, but his intelligence, knowledge, and sometimes bitchy or even snide judgments and comments forced me to look at why I disagreed with him and to take his judgments seriously.
Binyon simply doesn’t come across as deeply read enough in the genre to be creating categories and defining them. I’m not sure what real purpose this book served other than to knock better critical studies off the shelves. It certainly fails to offer any new insights. There is nothing in it that hadn’t been said better by Haycraft, Sandoe, Symons, and others before.
November 7th, 2014 at 4:31 pm
Oops. No wonder I passed on it the first time, if I actually even heard of back then. It’s too late to get my money back, but I can always tell myself that I’ve paid more to go see a fifth-rate movie and have had nothing to show for it afterward.
November 7th, 2014 at 5:29 pm
Steve
You may get more out of it than I did, but I just found it shallow and uninformative. His thesis of defining the genre by detective is interesting enough, but then he shows no perspective about where the detectives come from and trots them out as if they appeared out of limbo with only token nods toward the world they developed in.
For instance you cannot understand the popularity of the rational and logical Holmes and his antecedents without understanding the deep seated Victorian fear of atavism as expressed in Stevenson’s THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE right on the cusp of Holmes creation: Holmes is an Appollonian figure, a light bearer illuminating the darkness.
This isn’t bad if you didn’t pay much for it, but I’d read it after all the others rather than instead of them. It’s a shallow overview and not a good critique or history.
More so than most the detective story has very real historical and cultural roots and reasons for its evolution and without understanding them you can’t write deeply about it. There are reasons the modern thriller developed on the eve of WWI and the Golden Age Detective story in its aftermath and you can’t really understand either without knowing them and Binyon never gave me the feeling he did.
I’ll be interested if you get more out of it.