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It should be, although it is not, now a commonplace observation that the crime story has changed a good deal since the war: that, to put it simply, the detective story has changed into the crime novel. The change has been partly obscured by the fact that some of the detective story writers who became well known during the twenties and thirties are still in flourishing practice. ‘People are always pronouncing the doom of the detective story ... yet still the thing survives,’ Mr Edmund Crispin wrote a little while ago. ‘Publishers and the public persist in issuing and purchasing orthodox detective fiction with an enthusiasm which would probably surprise the doom-dealers if they could ever be persuaded to give the matter a moment’s thought. Mrs Christie still has butter to put on her bread. Mr Carr seems confident of being able to continue supporting his wife and family. There is happily no hint from America that Mr Queen is feeling the pinch.’

     Very true. But this urbane piece of special pleading ignores the changes that Mrs Christie and Mr Queen have felt it necessary to make in their once-omniscient detectives. Not for many years has Poirot’s friend, the more than Watsonianly idiotic Captain Hastings appeared in a story, and it is longer still since Ellery Queen issued, three-quarters of the way through his books, that ‘Challenge to the Reader’ which said that he now held all the relevant facts and should be able to deduce from them the single, logical answer. These writers have tactfully trimmed their sails to the prevailing wind. And when Mrs Christie, Mr Queen and Mr John Dickson Carr have laid down their pens, who will be their successors? The gap between the detective story and the crime novel is best expressed by this fact: not one of the crime writers who have come into prominence since the war has tried to establish a single character running through a series of books, like Poirot or Ellery Queen or Lord Peter Wimsey—or, for that matter, Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes. From a purely commercial point of view this is foolish, and the taste of writers is here running a long way ahead of the wishes of readers: but then the works of the new wave of crime writers belong in the hinterland of ‘entertainments’, for the intentions with which they are produced are at once serious and sensational. Without being exactly works of art, they are a good deal more than straightforward commercial products.

     To some people this change seems pure loss. Those who say firmly that they never read detective stories and those who say that they read nothing else are alike in one thing: they do not take them seriously. Their opponents say that they are bored by the artificiality of the form and the puzzle. Their supporters choose these very qualities for praise. To quote Mr Crispin again: ‘Orthodox detective fiction is in its essence artificial, contrived and fantastic.’ It is the contrivance, the fantasy, the feeling that the blood is only crimson lake, that permits bishops and cabinet ministers to relax pleasurably in a detective story after the strain of important events, rather as they might relax in a warm bath.

     To the detective story writer artifice is all: but the crime novelist is always trying, in one way or another, to break this convention, and to bring his characters into some sort of association with reality. This may sound as though all crime novelists are engaged in writing Roman Policiers, but the intentions are as varied as the writers. Let me show by example some of the differences between the old form that is dead, and the new one struggling to be born. Hillary Waugh’s Last Seen Wearing (1953) is a day by day account of the disappearance of a pretty American girl student from her college. Has she left voluntarily or been taken by force? Is she still alive? For a long time we don’t know. The book follows the course of the police investigation, with all its false steps, anxieties, small revelations. The girl’s parents dismiss at once the suggestion that she might have had an affair with a man. Mr Waugh probes at their pain, and shows us the shifts to which they resort, the desperate hiring of a private detective who does nothing at all, the shaky-voiced radio appeal. When a body is discovered they refuse to believe that it can be that of their daughter; the girl is six weeks pregnant. The book has some original features (the villain never appears in the story), but it is differentiated most sharply from the detective story convention by the painful scenes that show the parents’ self-deception. Such scenes could not possibly have any place in a detective story, in which it is understood that nice girl students do not become pregnant, and that nice parents are never deceived in their nice daughters.

     In a detective story policemen may be foolish, particularly by contrast with an omniscient amateur detective, but they are never really unpleasant. John Bingham’s My Name Is Michael Sibley (1952) was, I think, the first book to show in detail the cat and mouse technique often adopted by the police in dealing with suspects. Michael Sibley is innocent of murder, but he tells only part of the truth to the police. With each successive interview conducted by the Inspector and Sergeant in charge of the case, he sinks deeper into confusion and falsehood. With each interview their attitudes change, from avuncular benevolence, through jocular warnings about being careful, to mocking threats of violence. In the last long interview at Scotland Yard, while Inspector and Sergeant talk about him in the third person as though he were not there, Sibley has a sudden recollection of the torments of childhood.

     I saw myself as a small boy of about nine, pinned in a corner by three or four boys older than myself. One of these boys pulled my hair, and when I turned on him another crept up and kicked me. And now, when I rounded on him in turn, a third pulled my tie tight round my neck . . . A master came up and asked what we were doing. ‘Just playing, sir,’ they replied, and when he looked at me I repeated, ‘Just playing, sir.’

     In My Name Is Michael Sibley the murderer goes free, and this too is almost unthinkable in an orthodox detective story, but the radical break made by Bingham, here and in some of his other books, is in his treatment of the relations between police and suspects.

     More than thirty years ago the once-famous S. S. Van Dine laid down the stern precept that characterization could not be permitted in the detective story, because all characterization interfered with the abstract puzzle that, ideally, a detective story should be. Nowadays detective story writers are more flexible, but still, they have found in practice that they can’t afford too much characterization. A character who is made too ‘real’ tends to tear holes in the delicate fabric of the plot, and also to make the pasteboard construction of the other characters (who are present solely in the roles of suspects) rather painfully apparent. It is possible, in the convention of the detective story, that your villain shall be a psychopathic killer, but to examine and reveal the circumstances that created the psychopath, to shift the emphasis from a puzzle to a person, that would never do. In the emphasis placed upon characterization, the crime novel departs from the detective story. If we are not concerned with the relations between the characters, a crime novelist might naïvely ask, how can we begin to be interested in the story?

     One of the most original of all modern crime novels is Devil Take The Blue Tail Fly (1948), the third and unhappily the last crime novel written under his own name by the American John Franklin Bardin. This book opens with our introduction to a woman named Ellen, who is in a mental hospital because she has suffered some sort of mental breakdown. Ellen is now perfectly well again, and is waiting for her husband to come and take her home. On this, her last morning, she makes a request of the two nurses. She has noticed that they always take care to face her when they come into the room, and now she wants them to turn their backs. ‘I’d feel better now that I’m going home if you both did that.’ The nurses are surprised that she is concerned about such a little thing. They begin to laugh, all of them laugh together. Then they start to turn, but suddenly stop and look at each other and Ellen is overwhelmed with embarrassment, says that of course they shouldn’t bother to turn round, please don’t do it, she really doesn’t want them to, how can she have been so silly as to make such a request? This admirably planned opening scene catches perfectly the tone of the ambiguous horrors to come.

     The writer who has explored most consistently the area between ‘normality’ and psychosis is Miss Patricia Highsmith. Her American domestic tragedies are made memorable by the determination with which she digs into the psychological roots of crime. Her people are generally respectable, almost commonplace, like the feeble lawyer fly in The Blunderer (1956), caught by the appalling spider detective, or the complaisant husband in Deep Water (1958) who tells one of his wife’s lovers, as a kind of joke, that he had killed a man who made love to her. The joke is successful, the lover doesn’t come near the house again, and Victor Van Allen, delighted by the unfamiliar sense of power given him, moves slowly from pretence to reality.

     A comprehensive survey of recent developments in the crime novel would have to take into account a dozen other writers, including Margaret Millar, Patrick Quentin, and quite certainly Margot Bennett, who uses the puzzle framework to investigate the relationships between her characters with notable wit and style.

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     One shouldn’t exaggerate the merits or the originality of the crime novel. A few of its practitioners, like Miss Highsmith, write better than most ‘serious’ novelists, but most of them are content with readymade styles, neo-Hemingway or sub-Maugham, whose only virtue is sobriety. And as a form the crime novel is a hybrid, having roots both in the detective story and in the novel proper. Often the crime novelist uses some of the apparatus of the detective story. He may set a puzzle to be solved, offer a parade of clues, throw in at the end a rather arbitrary solution to his given crime: these are the concessions to the pop art of the detective story which he makes quite willingly, very often without realizing that they are concessions at all. Through such popular art he is trying, stammeringly and intermittently, to say something serious, and his work bears the same relationship to the detective story as that of the Goons bore to orthodox radio comedy. Much of the material is the same, but it is being used for quite different purposes. It is the bastard nature of the form, indeed, that helps to make it interesting. Nobody should set out to read a crime novel, any more than he should set out to read a piece of science fiction, under the impression that it is likely to be a work of literary art. The crime novelist’s insights are often fugitive and wayward, yet they are insights which, like those of science fiction, often could not be expressed in any other way.

     Let me give one typical and interesting example: Savage Streets, by the American William McGivern. In this story the children in a prosperous housing estate (rather like one of those estates recently developed in London, in which youngish advertising executives, architects, time and motion study men and near-artists wave through the picture window at their neighbour eating his Cooper’s Oxford in his modern kitchen-breakfast room) are terrorized into stealing money by a band of youths from the wrong side of town. The leading citizens of the housing estate are justly indignant. They join together and set out to teach the young hoodlums a lesson. There are reprisals and counter-reprisals. The righteous answering of force with force changes almost imperceptibly into mob violence. The book’s climax is the murder of the leader of the band of boys and the rape of his girl. One closes it feeling that at least the boys have a rough and ready sort of ethical code to which they adhere, but that on the other side there is merely a habit of respectability, unbacked by any morality at all. In theory there is no reason why the point made so effectively in Savage Streets shouldn’t be made in a ‘straight’ novel, but in practice it is a prerequisite that the writer should have a belief in the symbolic significance of violence in our social system.

     It is this interest in violence that distinguishes the crime novel from the detective story which is concerned, as Mr Crispin justly says, not with crime but with mystery, and from the ordinary novel in which an author may make use of a crime as an element in the plot. The Eustace Diamonds is all about the theft of some diamonds, The Last Chronicles of Barset about the apparently inexplicable loss of a sum of money, but Trollope has no personal involvement with these things, his true interests are elsewhere. The murder in Crime and Punishment, however, is at the very core of the book; it has for Dostoievsky and for us deep significance first as an act of violence.

     The importance of violence must be, I think, one of the first tenets of the crime novelist. We are all of us, to an increasing degree, in the position of those respectable citizens in Savage Streets. Our shocked response to every individual murder, our concern about whether capital punishment should be extended or abolished: what are these more than protective defences put up against refusal to think about the implications in the murder of six million Jews and the daily possibility of mass genocide? The gap between public and private morality widens every year under the shadow of extreme public violence, and its implications can be seen much more easily in the crime novel than in, for instance, the sprawling portentous neo-Jacobean outlines of William Styron’s Set This House On Fire, a recent ‘serious’ book which has the sensationalism of a crime novel without a good crime novel’s basic respect for reality.

     I suppose one should add that the virtues of involvement are limited. The crime novelist should be involved with his material as much as, say, a Method actor is involved in his part. His interest in some forms of crime may well be, like Dostoievsky’s or Dickens’s, obsessional, but for his own sake and for the sake of his work it should stop some way short of completeness. Complete involvement in a personal sense may lead him to prison: in a literary sense, to the production of pure fantasies of violence. There is an element of sensational fantasy, of private daydream, in almost all crime novels, and it is just this blending of private daydream with realism that gives the crime novel, even in the books of Dashiell Hammett which are perhaps its highest reaches, its peculiar quality and colour. The most one would claim for the best writers working in the form is that they sometimes illuminate the stresses placed on the human psyche in its relationship with society, in a way that nobody else is doing just now. That the light they throw is a lurid one doesn’t, after all, seem inappropriate to our present human situation.