Detective

New moon on September 14, 2023

This month brings us the Detective theme. Without the foundations laid by Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue or Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the detective story we know today might be unrecognizable. I doubt it, though, because the genre has a simple formula, easy to discover. A sleuth of some kind solves a mystery or a case or a problem that usually involves a criminal element.

As fun as Holmes is in small doses, my interest in the genre really begins with Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. Chandler’s essay, The Simple Art of Murder, is just about as good a discussion of the detective story of its day (1944) as you can find, so I’ll be brief here. A detective story can satisfy different interests among readers and writers. It can be ironic or serious; it can be polite parlor-room melodrama. It can be literary. It has as much potential as anyone could ask of it.

Given that modern society has a high-functioning police force (I didn’t say it functioned well or with uniform justice) where does the detective fit into all of this? The ubiquitous police procedural has one answer: they’re part of the police force. In other settings, they may operate on the fringe of policed society. Some storytellers take the mystery out of the criminal code altogether, pitting their detective against an issue that the police don’t have the time, inclination, or jurisdiction to unravel.

In a world where it’s easier than ever to retrieve information—and to find people—what is the future of the detective story? We see creators answer this in exciting ways. In some cases, they blend it with other genres, like sci fi and historical fiction. But the field remains open to another great shift. Almost a hundred years ago, the American authors mentioned above revived the genre’s humanity by insisting on a kind of realism that had gotten buried in the parlor room. What is the next step in the detective’s creative journey?

We hope this month’s prompts inspire you in your work!