Mon 14 Jun 2010
Reviewed by Marvin Lachman: LEROY LAD PANEK – Introduction to the Detective Story.
Posted by Steve under Reference works / Biographies , Reviews[13] Comments
by Marvin Lachman
LEROY LAD PANEK – An Introduction to the Detective Story. Popular Press, Bowling Green University, hardcover/trade paperback, 1987.
Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring 1988.
If LeRoy Lad Panek’s An Introduction to the Detective Story seems like a textbook for a college course on the mystery, veteran readers should not be put off. Panek, a former Edgar winner, is more knowledgeable than anyone has a right to be, especially regarding the mystery before Poe.
Yet, the book is equally strong for its frequent wit, proving that writing about the mystery can be fun. Insights and historical perspective leap off every page.
Panek devotes considerable space to the usually neglected turn-of-the-twentieth-century writers, after pointing out that “Doyle’s first 24 Sherlock Holmes stories created such a demand they turned people into detective-story writers overnight.”
Though giving full credit to Doyle and his creation in as good a one-chapter summary as I can recall, he points out Doyle’s weaknesses as a novelist — but also his strengths as a short-story writer.
Both the Golden Age and the rise of the hardboiled mystery are well handled. Regarding the former, Panek is persuasive how the classic puzzles were a double reaction on the part of writers and readers to the mindless thriller as well as avant garde mainstream fiction, with its de-emphasis on story.
Private eyes like Race Williams and the Continental Op are correctly pointed out as contemporaries of Doyle, thus reminding us that hardboiled fiction, after more than sixty years, is just as traditional a form of the genre as the classic puzzles.
Considering the amount of information Panek dispenses, he makes relatively few factual errors. The Detective Book Club is misnamed the “Detective Story Club.” Mary Roberts Rinehart is said to have died in 1926, though she lived on for more than thirty years longer.
Christie’s And Then There Were None is dated 1930, not 1939. Dennis Wheatley’s “File” books did contain narratives, though through letters, telegrams, and police reports, rather than the usual story-telling devices.
I also would quarrel with Panek’s loose use of psychological terminology. He refers to “psychotic” heroines of Gothic novels when they were only nervous, usually due to their mysterious employers and those single lights which kept shining in windows.
Vidocq is called a “paranoiac” when even Panek’s description shows him to be merely self-promoting. A reference to “pathological insanity” is surely redundant, since I doubt if any doctors have seen cases of insanity without mental pathology.
Panek’s book may be the best history of the entire field written to date. If ever a book deserved a second printing, It is An Introduction to the Detective Story. That would afford an opportunity to clear up some of the errors and would mean it had reached the substantial audience it deserves.
Editorial Comment: This is the third in a series of reviews in which Marv covered reference works published in 1987, books about the field of mystery and crime fiction. Preceding this one was Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, by H. R. F. Keating. You can find it here.
June 14th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
This is, surprisingly enough, not a book I own. And if I was aware of its existence in 1987, I had forgotten about it until I read Marv’s review earlier today.
I’ve since remedied that. A copy is on its way to me by mail, even as I speak.
June 14th, 2010 at 5:40 pm
A good one, I enjoyed Panek’s book on spy fiction too — even when I disagree with him (Doyle wasn’t a particularly good mystery novelist, but did some good work in historical novels).
But a good read by a knowledgeable writer with a style that doesn’t get in the way — though he does, as pointed out here — tend to overuse trite psychobabble and finds a ‘hysteric’ to be ‘psychotic’ and brands a first rate egoist (or egotist if you must) as paranoiac (it’s not paranoia when you have as many enemies as Vidocq had).
Good book, if your opinions are strong enough not to let Panek’s sometimes eccentric opinions change them.
June 14th, 2010 at 6:53 pm
I’m not a great fan of this one, at least in regard to its treatment of the Golden Age. His basic thesis that the fair play convention made for bad detective novels I disagree with most heartily. Here are twenty claims he makes with which I disagree (I get into some of this in my book manuscript):
1. There was no serious mystery criticism in the period (wrong; he only cites the capsule reviews from the Saturday Review in the 1930s to support this contention)
2. The Detection Club was founded in 1928 (wrong)
3. “Every significant British author of the era belonged” to it (wrong)
4. Christie did not “play fair” in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (disagree)
5. Ackroyd was “widely criticized” (exaggerated)
6. But it was the era’s “most popular” mystery (really? if he means by sales this is doubtful)
7. Following the “rules” “made rotten fiction” (disagree)
8. “Over-stressing” the problem part of the detective story “generated lot of mechanical, boring books (okay, but also some very good ones)
9. Only a few writers in the 1930s like Anthony Berkeley Cox and Graham Greene (is the latter really a genre writer or a mainstream nvelist?) began to look seriously at the “moral issues” of crime (there actually were quite a few)
10. Edgar Wallace was an “uncultured hack” (this is unduly dismissive, it seems to me, even if he was awesomely prolific)
11. Doyle and Austin Freeman merely had “technical educations” and thus were inferior to “sophisticated” writers like Chesterton (and to the later Crime Queens and Detection Dons)
12. Educated readers could not read Mary Roberts Rinehart (well, the classically educated Dorothy L. Sayers liked her and Rinehart was one of the bestselling mystery writers in the US and generally received good reviews, so I’d say wrong here as well)
13. All Golden Age books take place in one fixed, limited locale (has Panek ever read a Freeman Wills Crofts novel)
14. Christie’s detective novels were really thrillers (he makes this dubious point previously and at greater length in Watteau’s Shepherds)
15. With the exception of Simenon’s Maigret, all British police detective heroes come from the upper class (Inspector French? Superintendent Wilson?)
16. Sayers wrote only one true puzzle novel, The Five red Herrings (Panek must have a limited definition of what a puzzle novel is)
17. The claim that a puzzle novel provided readers with mental exercise is “less than valid) (what would call it?)
18. Readers did not care about solving puzzles (his “proof” of this is that few library editions he has seen have marginal jottings in them–um, what if they took notes on note cards? in any event, you can try to solve a mystery puzzle with using pencil and paper)
19. “To read S. S. Van Dine is to understand the true meaning of stultification” (yet he was a bestselling author in the 1920s–one of the most popular mystery writers of the period–if mystery readers didn’t care about puzzles, why did they read him? also, he’s not so bad!)
20. Detective novels only became truly good when they rejected the fair play standard (really? take a look at the Crime Queens’ books again–most are fair play–and they are Panek’s gold standard, seemingly)
June 14th, 2010 at 7:40 pm
Curt
All your points go to what I call ‘eccentric opinions’ and why I think it’s important that you know something about the genre and what you think before reading Panek’s “political” opinions (he’s a Brit leftie — it really shows in his book on spy fiction where he tries to elevate Le Carre to sainthood).
He does write well, and he is good on the early period right after Doyle, but again his mix of politics and snobbery (Doyle and Freeman’s ‘technical educations’)and outright mistakes require a reader who knows what he is writing about.
No major critics, eh? So Howard Haycraft was slumming?
Again, I enjoyed the book, but not for newcomers or anyone who doesn’t know what they think and enough history — or at least how to research it themselves — to combat Panek’s broad and often mistaken statements.
Incidentally I agree ACKROYD is fair play. There is one clue that is perfectly fair play — which readers almost always miss because of their own prejudice and what they expect. As for being the biggest seller of the Brit Golden Age that is unlikely. I would imagine several of Christie’s books outsold it.
But as for Panek, he’s worth reading so long as you understand his opinions aren’t facts (which he doesn’t).
June 14th, 2010 at 8:00 pm
Curt
After reading all 20 of the claims you say Panek makes, I hope that Marv’s assumption (in his first paragraph) that book might be used as a text in college courses didn’t turn out to be true.
It’s fun to read books like this, but as David says, you have to have some knowledge yourself to separate out the facts from faulty facts and of course unsubstantiated claims.
I’m glad I didn’t have to spend a lot of money on the book, but I’m looking forward to getting it!
— Steve
June 14th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
Steve
Just a note. Anytime you read British literary criticism of genre fiction you have to take into account it is political in a way American criticism of genre fiction generally isn’t.
Since many of the Brit critics from the later period are left leaning (Julian Symons included) you have to know going in that their opinions are often as much motivated by British politics as literary judgments.
It’s only in recent years both John Buchan and Ian Fleming’s reputations have begun to overcome this political criticism. Just keep in mind when you read many of the British critics like Panek and Symons, that some of their opinions are politically motivated. It’s rare to find a British genre critic like Keating or Colin Watson who is able to deal with work from an earlier period based on its actual merits and not on its politics — or theirs.
That said, it makes for good reading if you know what you are getting into.
But I agree, Panek is far too political for a text. He’s the type critic where his opinion trumps a fact every time, which makes for lively reading, but not much value as history.
June 14th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
I think Panek makes a good point about the British detection writers wanting to distinguish themselves from “thrillers” of the Edgar Wallace-Sax Rohmer type (I’m always surprised to see genre studies do so little with Wallace, when he was so big in UK, and a lot of the detective fiction “rules” were fashioned with him in mind). Probably one reason British critics tended to be slow to embrace the merit in the American hardboiled style was their association of action in the mystery genre with “lowbrow” English thrillers (though personally I find some of Wallace’s stuff entertaining).
But where I am bothered by Panek is where he treats the puzzle aspect of the detective novel so dismissively. He seems to take for granted that he’s writing for an audience that will share his disdain for the puzzle, and maybe he was–but count me out of that group! I find him condescending on this point. Preferring Michael Innes to R. Austin Freeman doesn’t mean you are smarter than the other poor schlep, just that you are more interested in literary allusion than applied science. I don’t know why the one is inherently superior to the other. Personally I think Thorndyke’s activities are pretty fascinating.
Panek seems to take for granted, probably because he was familiar with the Had-I-but-Known tag, that Rinehart was for dummies. Now as I recall her play “The Bat”, based on her novel The Circular Staircase, made it into Bill Pronzini’s Gun in Cheek, and she’s not my personal favorite; but I think it’s sort of silly to say no “educated” person could enjoy her books. As I’ve already mentioned Dorothy L. Sayers gave one of Rinehart’s mysteries a very strong (and long) review, precisely on the grounds that it was more “literary” in style. Rinehart certainly was under the impression that she herself was more a serious crime novelist than a “mere” mystery writer.
In his effort to downgrade the puzzle Panek argues here and in Watteau’s Shepherds that Christie was really a thriller writer in disguise, that her books were not fair play, cannot be solved, etc. I just think this is patently wrong. Christie’s detective novels are most certainly fair play and people did (and still do) like to try to solve them.
I just get the feeling Panek was read up on the Crime Queens, Detection Dons (Innes and Blake), Francis Iles and Carr and not too much else. He’s simply wrong in some of his comments, like when he says the Coles’ Superintendent Wilson was an upper class type like Roderick Alleyn. He wasn’t and neither was Inspector French. They were just typical blokes! Panek credits Simenon with creating the police procedural, but Simenon’s early books have been pointed out to be pretty slipshod on matters of police procedure. Henry Wade, who knew a great deal about the subject, was an important precursor figure in the development of the police procedural subgenre (Michael Gilbert confirms this), but is nowhere mentioned.
We need to have good surveys of the genre, but my problems with Panek’s handling of the Golden Age would lead me to hesitate in recommending his book for classroom use. I actually prefer Julian Symons by a good measure, though, as David says, he shares some of the same biases.
Panek is still active (just retired from teaching, I believe) and some of his work on the American detective novel from the 1990s looks interesting, though I haven’t read any of it. I hope I don’t sound unduly harsh, but Panek has won one or two Edgars, so I’m sure he can take it!
June 15th, 2010 at 12:16 am
Curt
Again, with Panek opinion often trumps fact, such as suggesting the Maigret’s are any kind of procedural novel. Inspector French is closer to procedural than Maigret. How anyone could speak of procedurals in this period and not mention Henry Wade strikes me as pretty careless.
I prefer Symons too, mainly because despite his prejudices Symons experience as a writer forces him to be a bit more realistic. And I think his love of the genre is a bit closer to our own.
The best books on the golden age and how they were perceived by the public that read them are Colin Watson’s SNOBBERY WITH VIOLENCE and Keating’s lovely little book MURDER MUST APPETISE. Watson not only quotes sales figures, but discusses social milieu, prejudice (both the public and writers), why the books were so popular and why that era was so important to the genre. Both books also include some lovely illustrations — including some great cartoons in the Watson book.
There are certainly thriller elements in Christie — and a few books are overcome by them like THE BIG FOUR — but there are also thriller elements in Sayers and certainly in Philip Macdonald. But to call any of them thriller writers is highly unlikely.
Wallace and Rohmer both deserve some attention from serious critics if only for being the chief sources for all the rules. Both writers are uneven, but both can be fun to read, and Wallace achieves some good moments when he isn’t writing so fast he loses his place in mid paragraph.
Other than the excellent Mr. Reeder and Just Men stories I’d suggest THE NORTHING TRAMP, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE FROG, THE CRIMSON CIRCLE, THE RINGER, DARK EYES OF LONDON, and THE BRIGAND as good examples of his work. For Rohmer THE GREEN EYES OF BAST, QUEST OF THE SACRED SLIPPER, THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED, and GREY FACE are good entries. For that matter there is a good deal of good work out there by E. Phillips Oppenheim too, another writer the Detection Club reacted against in addition to Wallace, Rohmer, and Sapper.
Rinehart was primarily a woman’s writer, but certainly I think the idea only dummies read her is mostly Panek’s prejudice more than any facts. Eventually there was a reaction to her and the HIBK school among more serious proponents of the detective story, but while she certainly could be bad (and by the way the novel of THE BAT wasn’t written by Rinehart, she wrote the play with Avery Hopwood — the novelization was written by — wait for it — Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Vincent Benet long before his “The Devil and Daniel Webster”!), her best book was, for my taste, THE MAN IN LOWER 10, which is a pretty good read, though her first, THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE (1908 while the play THE BAT was based on this there was a later novelization of the play written by Benet and not Rinehart) is worth reading too.
I don’t know where Panek gets that all the golden age sleuths are aristocrats certainly not Father Knox’s middle class sleuth Miles Bredon, Sayer’s Montague Egg, Leo Bruce’s Sgt. Beef, Basil Thompson’s P.C. Richardson, David Frome’s Mr. Pinkerton, Anthony Gilbert’s Arthur Crook, Heyer’s Hemingway, Miss Marple and Poirot, and Father Brown certainly isn’t. If anything, even when the sleuth is an aristocrat like Lord Peter, aristocrats in general come in for pretty general ribbing in the Wodehouse manner in the genre. In fact a good argument could be made that the genre in this era is decidedly middle class finding aristocrats figures of fun.
I like Innes, but the idea he is inherently superior to Freeman is one of the more peculiar of Panek’s ideas. Innes writes literary phantazmagoria of a high order, and his best work includes some of the most delightful books in the genre, but Thorndyke and Freeman are second only to Holmes and Doyle or Brown and Chesterton in importance — and entertainment. If nothing else his invention of the inverted story is as important as Doyle’s creation of Holmes and Chesterton’s use of paradox. And in terms of influence Sayer’s was a huge fan of Thorndyke. In the end few writers followed Freeman’s lead only because the rigors of the science was too much for them. Even Raymond Chandler praised Freeman — if backhandedly.
But Panek is opinionated and writes well, and though I made copious notes about my disagreements with this and WATTEAU’S SHEPHERDS as I read them, I enjoyed both. As critics go he’s a gadfly — which isn’t a bad thing for a critic to be, you just don’t want a text book written by one.
June 15th, 2010 at 12:52 am
I was surprised how much I enjoyed Freeman when I turned to him some years back, after repeatedly reading how boring he was. I like Chesterton too (and some of Innes). For me, one of the great things about the Golden Age was its variety. I find it more varied and interesting than people tend to make out today. It’s certainly not all about toffs lounging around in country houses while baronets get bludgeoned in their studies, then, a few literary quotations, heigh-ho!, case solved by the brilliant gentleman amateur detective! I have nothing against those tales, but I just wish it was more recognized that there was a bit more going on back then.
In making his point about Christie detective novels really being thrillers, Panek in Watteau’s Shepherds relies heavily on And Then There Were None, which is being a tad selective, I would say! Why not look at the Murder of Roger Ackroyd? Or The Murder at the Vicarage? Or Cards the Table? Or… (one can go on and on).
My favorite Rinehart actually is The Case of Jennie Brice, another early one. Very nice setting in a flooded Pittsburgh. I think critics used to be able to get away with a more dismissive treatment of HIBK writers (it’s always men who used that term!). Some of them are dreadful, but women academics (and some of the men) have been mounting a defense of them more recently.
By the way, one of my favorites lines is from Gun in Cheek, on the Gothic novel: a story about a woman who buys a house!
June 15th, 2010 at 1:23 am
Curt
I don’t know if you noticed, but in Keating’s 100 Best CRIME AND MYSTERY volume he chose Ethel Lina White’s THE WHEEL SPINS (basis of Hitchcock’s THE LADY VANISHES) as one of his 100 best — while White was sometimes labeled the British Rinehart — unfairly as she was a better writer overall.
BRICE is another good Rinehart, and if I’m not a big fan I don’t look down on her work either. She was important in growing the genre, but she so dominated the scene for a while as with Van Dine the reaction against her went too far. There likely would not be an American detective story without them.
The Rinehart school took a few twists along the way too, with some pretty good writers including Mignon G. Eberhart, Marjorie Carleton, and eventually Charlotte Armstrong in her wake.
As for Van Dine, I still like Philo Vance. Van Dine has his flaws, and you can complain that the killer always shows up on the same page, but in his wake we got Ellery Queen and Nero Wolfe. You can argue that Rinehart and Van Dine were as influential on this side of the pond as Doyle and Christie on the other.
While I recognize the weaknesses of the classical Golden Age story it could be played for some highly entertaining variations, and many of the writers were better than they get credit for. I think even Symons points out Christie is generally a better writer than she is given credit for, and many of the things she is attacked for aren’t flaws, but the nature of what she is writing. Her characters are drawn to be pawns in the puzzle and she gives us just enough to do that. In short she achieves exactly what she intends to do.
There may be no showy stylistic passages in Christie, but there is no bad writing or careless writing either aside from a few early books and a few late ones. She is remarkably consistent as a writer, gets better as she goes along (up to a point) and can even surprise as she does in the Harley Quin stories.
Ironically there are passages in Innes, who Panek is so enamored of, that don’t hold up half as well as Christie’s plain good writing. She’s a remarkably consistent writer. Frankly I find some of Cox’s Roger Sherringham material unreadable and painful, but I can’t say that of Christie. She wrote for her audience, and we loved her for it.
But critics like Panek either pick and choose or paint with too broad a brush. You can’t lump everyone in the Golden Age together. Sometimes even individual writers are incredibly uneven — John Rhode could be brilliant and incredibly dull, and you never knew which you would get when you read him either as Rhode or Burton, though early on he was more often brilliant and it isn’t until the war the uneven aspect really kicks in.
But for a while, good, bad, and average, it really was the ‘Grandest Game in the World,’ and for those of us who still love it always will be.
June 15th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
Curt and David
Besides being totally in awe by the amount of knowledge of the detective story novel each of you have displayed in your comments above, I as a result have a pretty good picture what this book’s about, what it does well and what it doesn’t.
And I think everyone else should, too.
I thank you both.
— Steve
June 21st, 2010 at 8:53 pm
[…] Preceding this one was An Introduction to the Detective Story, by Leroy Lad Panek. You can find it here. […]
October 29th, 2010 at 5:10 am
I’m coming late at the party (various problems I won’t discuss considerably slowed my reading and blog-following over this year) but I’d like to add something about the question of the Maigret books as police procedurals: are they or are they not? My answer would be: both. It depends on which story you’re considering. Some Maigret are strong on plot; some are more character-focused. Some are whodunits, some are not. Maigret’s detection itself varies according to the book. In The Yellow Dog for instance, he is very much the master detective with more than a little wink at Gaboriau’s Lecoq (though Maigret in this book claims to “never deduce” he is at his most deductive there) while in others he follows police routine, acts as an adventurer or a private detective (“The Hanged Man of Saint-Phollien”) or play the psychological card. In some books (“Maigret at the Coroner”) he doesn’t even investigate at all. So labeling the Maigret books is very, very risky.
I’ve recently ordered Panek’s “Origins of the American Detective Story” and I find it extremely instructive and his leanings are not as intrusive as they seem to be in the book you discussed. I haven’t read Watteau’s Sheperds but the French translation was slammed by some of our critics as being too benevolent to Golden Age writers, and I have difficulty to reconciliate this with the darker picture both Curt and David made here. On the other hand, French critics are a very peculiar lot – only recently have they begun to consider there might be more to crime fiction than hardboiled and noir.