FOREWORD
Fiat Lux! declared
Edgar Allan Poe and in the
beginning was The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The detective story
begins with its publication in the April, 1841
issue of Graham's Magazine.
Howard Haycraft states in his
excellent Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective
Story (1941): "Clearly there could be no
detective stories (and there were none) until there were detectives. This did
not occur until the nineteenth century." Philip Van Doren has well said:
"Like printing, the detective story has been improved upon only in a mechanical
way since it was first invented; as artistic products
Gutenberg's
Bible and Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue have never been
surpassed."
It is odd that the first detective stories should have been written by an
American with the scenes laid in Paris. But we must recall that the
Sûreté Générale and Scotland Yard were in existence at a
time when American police methods had no such centralization, so Poe had no native
types to draw upon. He knew Paris well, displaying wide knowledge of its police
system and with the Memoirs (Paris, 1827) of the famed
Vidocq,
criminal turned cop. Charles Baudelaire translated Poe's tales magnificently in the
1850's and '60's when he was out-of-print in his own country, and the most
impressive of all editions is that published in four large quarto volumes,
lavishly illustrated (Paris, 1927-28). Poe was also well-received in
England, the first illustrated editions of his works appearing there in the
early 1850's. All these are included in this exhibit.
The next great step in the development of the genre was the publication in book
form of Emile
Gaboriau's L'Affair Lerouge (Paris, 1866). This has the
distinction of being the first full-length detective novel and had immense
success. Two years later Wilkie Collin's
The Moonstone appeared,
the first English detective novel and, according to T. S. Eliot "the
first, the longest and the best," though the first two of these adjectives are
disputable. It was not until eleven years later, in 1878, that the first native detective novel appeared in
America, Anna
Katherine Green's The Leavenworth Case. This firmly
establishes her as the mother of the detective story: "The first woman," says
Haycraft, "to practice the form in any land or language." However, we were
reading them avidly before then, as The Widow Lerouge was issued
in translation in Boston (Osgood, 1873) and The Moonstone in New
York (Harper) the same year as its London appearance.
Then, in 1887 an obscure doctor, A. Conan Doyle, had a
story, A Study in Scarlet, published in the Christmas number of a
well-known English magazine, The Strand. After that, the deluge.
It is curious that there have been few significant detective stories written
outside the English speaking-French circle, though they have been very popular
everywhere in translation. It should be remembered that they were suppressed in
Italy and Germany early in the Second World War. The Nazi Party ordered the
withdrawal of all imported detective fiction from German bookshops and declared
them "pure liberalism" designed to "stuff the heads of German readers with
foreign ideas." In any event it seems that Dictators and Detectives, amateur or
otherwise, don't jell.
To John Carter belongs the
honor of having produced the first bibliographical study, "Detective Fiction" in
New Paths in Book Collecting (London, Constable, 1934), when it was indeed a new path. He was also among
its first serious collectors, and the earliest rare book catalogue devoted
entirely to the subject, compiled by him from his own collection, was issued by
Scribners in 1934. This collection was acquired
en bloc by the Lilly Library some years back
and has been greatly expanded since. It is the basis of our collection, and a
goodly part of it is in this exhibition. As this is the first comprehensive
exhibition of the genre to be attempted, we are privileged to quote from
Carter's "Introduction" to
Dorothy Glover and
Graham Greene's Victorian
Detective Fiction (London, 1906):
In the year 1927, when I came down from
Cambridge, I was a keen reader, and of course I liked to think a
discriminating one, of detective stories. If Sherlock Holmes had been a
household word before I was born (in the early 1890s the fans used to
queue outside Newnes's office for the new issue of The
Strand), I was already aware that he had predecessors as well as
successors, even though no detective, then or since, has approached his
hold on an international public. 'Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona', as
E. M. Wrong,
the Magdalen historian, quoted in the course of his
introduction (still one of the best things of its kind) to a selection
of short detective stories in the World's Classics series, 1926. 'Do you know Huckleberry Finn?' says
Sigsbee Manderson's American secretary to Philip Trent: 'Do I know my
own name?' the detective replied. I could have said the same, not only
of Trent's Last Case itself or The Murders in the
Rue Morgue, The Moonstone or The Red
Thumb Mark, of The Cask, The Verdict of
You All, The Greene Murder Case or Whose
Body?, but also (which is more than I could now) of a dozen or
two more of the classics of detective fiction. And if it would be too
much to claim more than a handful of the less-known
pre-Conan Doyle
stories as classics, I at least knew that they were numerous and was
familiar with some of them.
When, therefore, I went to work in the rare book business—where,
if you are only a hired hand, it is impracticable to be a collector of
anything the customers might want—I exchanged my adolescent
enthusiasm for early editions of the Latin classics and for modern fine
printing (favorite field for neophytes) for this then seemingly remote
hunting-ground. Poe, of course,
was collected by the Americans, as a
star in their literary firmament. H. W. Bell and presumably a few other
sufferers from Sherlockholmitis were collecting
Conan Doyle. But in
those dear, distant days the average bibliophile (let alone the
averagely contemptuous layman) would have reckoned virtually certifiable
a man who was found combing Foyles and the sixpenny boxes for first
editions of 'Lawrence L. Lynch',
T. W. Speight,
Fergus Hume,
B. L. Farjeon,
'Dick Donovan',
George R. Sims,
J. S. Fletcher,
Headon Hill,
Arthur Morrison,
M. McDonnell Bodkin;
first English (if nothing better) editions of the Americans
Anna Katherine Green and
Allan Pinkerton, the
Frenchmen Gaboriau and
du Boisgobey.
(Are there any German or Italian detective stories?) As for those incunabular figures,
'Waters',
'Charles Martel',
Andrew Forrester Jr.
and the other prolific writers of the (mostly yellow-back) romans policiers in
the 1850s and 1860s, I don't know that even
Michael Sadleir had thought
enough of them to do more than penetrate their pseudonyms.
While the sun stayed in, I made hay; and so, no doubt, did any other
premature addicts. In four or five years I had accumulated perhaps 350
first (or occasionally merely early) editions of detective fiction from
1845 to 1930.
One has to have a terminal date—or else buy a warehouse. Mine
was thirty years later than that adopted by Glover-
Greene; and the
reader will have noticed that I confined my name-dropping at the end of
the preceding paragraph to authors we both collected. But by 1932 times were changing.
Elkin Mathews, those
habitual pioneers, had taken up Sherlock Holmes, and in their catalogue
no. 47 had the hardihood to price fine copies of the Adventures
and Memoirs at £35 the pair. Nor was
Conan Doyle still a
special case: Eric Osborne, in The Bookman, had made the
first professional attack on the broad field of detective bibliography.
From the way booksellers began to react to my routine enquiry it was
clear that other collectors were waking up, and that my remote preserve
was a preserve no longer.
Its contents were put to two last practical uses in the year 1934: the
Scribner Bookstore's catalogue no. 98, of Detective Fiction, an
annotated list of 378 items (I had made some additions after disposing
of my collection) with an index not only of authors but of detectives;
and an essay on 'Collecting Detective Fiction' in a symposium entitled
New Paths in Book Collecting, which was inspired and
published by Michael Sadleir
and which we intended as a sort of manifesto against table d'hôte
bibliophily and all the other dead wood of the 1920s.
It was Mr. Haycraft who,
by firmly labeling some random generalisation of
mine 'Carter's dictum', and deploying argument therefrom, brought home
to me that I had become—blamelessly, from no intention or wish
of mine, simply by the effluxion of time—an 'authority' on the
detective story. An authority, in such context, means an old fogy who
once knew something about the subject and is still (just) worth quoting
if what he said is to your purpose.
My own criterion for an authentic detective story is on record, and I
don't intend to abandon it: 'A detective story, within the meaning of
the act, must be mainly or largely occupied with detection and should
contain a proper detective, whether amateur or professional'.
The following is from the compiler's Dukedom Large Enough: Reminiscences
of a Rare Book Dealer (New York, Random House, 1969):
The issuance of Scribners catalogue of Detective Fiction was to provide
deep disappointment to many collectors who ordered from it,
among them Ned Guymon, whose incomparable collection of
J. S. Fletcher
still lacks Andrewlina (London, 1889). It is not
Fletcher's
first book, as the late John Hayward,
commenting on its absence in remarks on the library in The Book
Collector, said (a rare bibliographical error on his part).
Andrewlina was preceded by three others. But it is
certainly Fletcher's
rarest—a fact not known when it was priced
$6 in the catalogue. No copy has appeared in trade since, to my
knowledge. The very day the catalogue was put into the mail a lady
walked in, saw the books and promptly bought the entire group. She was
not a collector, she explained, she just liked to read detective
stories, and here was a whole batch of them she had never heard of. Her
husband had something to do with the police department, she confided,
and after reading these she thought it would be nice to present them to
the department's library.
Some thirty years had passed when I received a
call from Harold Graves, my successor at Scribners. Would the Lilly
Library be interested in purchasing the collection? "Yes, of course," I
replied, perhaps a little too eagerly and promptly. A price was agreed
on and then Harold told me the story. The lawyer settling the woman's
estate called him to ask if the firm would be interested in
repurchasing the collection. It seems they hadn't been touched since
she bought them—neither added to, nor subtracted from nor,
luckily, given away. What, Graves inquired, would be the price? The
lawyer replied that the books were pretty old when she bought them, and
thirty years older now. He had found Scribners original bill in one of
them and he would be happy if the estate could get what she had paid for
them. Graves was willing. I glance fondly at Andrewlina
when I pass its way in the stacks.
The finest collection of detective stories in first editions ever assembled, or
likely to be, is that formed by E. T. Guymon, Jr., of San Diego, California, who
began collecting in the early '30's and whose collection has been given to
Occidental College. Fred Danny,
50 percent of "Ellery Queen," was another early
ardent collector, author of the standard The Detective Short Story: A
Bibliography (1942), among many other
pioneer works (including the delving into obscure magazines), whose eminent
collection is now at the University of Texas. And in England Eric Quale has just
published The Collector's Book of Detective Fiction (1972) based on his own
library.
The Lilly Library's holdings are not as extensive as those mentioned above,
though only a fraction are listed in this exhibition, but it is the peer of any
in quality and rarity. The standard of condition is high, almost all being in
original bindings and many in dust jackets, while the scarcity of a number of
the books is notorious. The exhibition is devoted strictly (with a few personal
favorite exceptions) to the detective story under
Carter's definition. Mystery,
crime, bloods, thrillers, "science-fiction," etc., all of which Lilly has
excellent collections, are excluded to await, someday, an exhibition of their
own.
Due to problems of space and the "100 Year, 100 Author" limitation set on the
exhibition, it must necessarily be selective. In very few
cases—excepting
Poe and
Doyle—have as many as three books by
one author been included, and first books (quite often the best, and usually the
rarest) have been preferred when available. All books are standard 12mo and
first editions, unless otherwise noted. As hopefully, many more
devotees of the genre will be interested in the exhibition than will be able to
attend it and as, in many cases, it will be difficult for them ever to see their
favorites in their editio principes, the catalogue is rather heavily
illustrated. With apologies to
Stephen Vincent Benét's Book of
Americans:
We couldn't put in all the great
Or even all the small
And many names with sterling claims
We haven't used at all.
But here's a rather varied lot
As anyone can see
And all and each, by deed and speech
Adorned:
The Detective Story.
David A. Randall
Librarian
The Lilly
Library
