FFB: American Detective

In the 1996 anthology The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert collected 33 stories that help trace the evolution of crime fiction in the U.S. from locked room mysteries, to hard-boiled tales of the '30s and '40s, to police procedurals from the latter part of the 20th century.

The book starts off with Poe and "Murders in the Rue Morge," which Hillerman notes is the basic model for the classic detective tale. He also points out how American authors tended to be ignorant of—or just plain ignore—the conventions of Ronald Knox's "Ten Commandments of Detective Writing" from 1928 as well as the philosophy of what editor/critic Jacques Brazum called "escape literature for the intellectual."

Instead of focusing exclusively on whodunit, writers like Ed McBain were more interested in why the crime had been committed, as in his story "Small Homicide," included in the anthology. Or hints of social purpose and realism, as in Anna Katherine Green's "Missing: Page Thirteen," featuring one of the earliest femle protagonists. Or a peek into social decadence and the human condition, as shown in Raymond Chandler's "I'll Be Waiting."

The goal of Hillerman and Herbert was to illustrate as many aspects of the American detective story as they could, with amateur sleuths, ethnic sleuths, regional sleuths, scientific sleuths like Arthur B. Reed's Professor Craig Kenndy, hard-boiled private eyes like Robert Leslie Bellem's Dan Turner and cops like Hillerman's own Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn in the story "Chee's Witch."

Although the editors had an educational intention in mind, they also wanted to entertain, hoping readers "will find the volume just plain fun to read." It is most definitely that, and also a reminder of all the wonderful contributions that the late Tony Hillerman himself made to enrich and promote crime fiction.

For more suggestions for Friday's Forgotten Books, check out Patti Abbott's blog.

Comments

[Richard R]

I got this from the library soon after it came out, and reading it I kept hoping for something a little more cohesive instead of the scattergun approach used. Not that it's a bad collection, but as you say it "had an educational intention in mind", while I wanted just fun reading.

[BV Lawson]

Hopefully, books like this will give newer readers a taste of both short crime fiction and the works of the authors included enough to make them venture out father into the genre sea. Or not! But I've found some new-to-me authors via anthologies, myself.