By PJ Parrish

I am gearing up for my annual gig as chair of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Awards. This year is pretty special because it’s the 80th birthday of the venerable organization itself.

Digression: You’d think if you make it to your 80th anniversary, the appropriate gift would be something cool like diamond or platinum. Nope, the 80th is oak. What, for a coffin?

Well, maybe a coffin is apt, considering what we here all do — putting bodies in the ground. Anywho, we are going to honor MWA’s eightith by taking a look back to celebrate what was unique about each decade. So I’ve been boning up on crime fiction history this week. I am rather ashamed at my ignorance on this subject. Believe me, I have been trying for years now to get up to speed on my reading of our classics. But the MWA celebration is also forcing me to dig deeper into the less obvious writers and books.

And I’d like to pick y’all’s brains for some help on who and what books we should be including. More on that in a sec.

But first: Let’s review.

I suspect most of you know already that Edgar Allen Poe’s 1941 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue is considered the first detective story. But do you know what is considered to be the first full-length mystery novel? That would be Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, published in 1861. Here’s the opening:

Chapter One

In the first part of Robinson Crusoe, at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you will find it thus written:

“Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it.”

Only yesterday, I opened my Robinson Crusoe at that place. Only this morning (May twenty-first, Eighteen hundred and fifty), came my lady’s nephew, Mr. Franklin Blake, and held a short conversation with me, as follows:—

“Betteredge,” says Mr. Franklin, “I have been to the lawyer’s about some family matters; and, among other things, we have been talking of the loss of the Indian Diamond, in my aunt’s house in Yorkshire, two years since. Mr. Bruff thinks, as I think, that the whole story ought, in the interests of truth, to be placed on record in writing—and the sooner the better.”

Not perceiving his drift yet, and thinking it always desirable for the sake of peace and quietness to be on the lawyer’s side, I said I thought so too. Mr. Franklin went on.

“In this matter of the Diamond,” he said, “the characters of innocent people have suffered under suspicion already—as you know. The memories of innocent people may suffer, hereafter, for want of a record of the facts to which those who come after us can appeal. There can be no doubt that this strange family story of ours ought to be told. And I think, Betteredge, Mr. Bruff and I together have hit on the right way of telling it.”

If you didn’t get through it, don’t feel bad. I tried to read this book to give it an honest chance but the sledding was too tough. If I were doing a Kill Zone First Page Critique on this, well, let’s just say I would try to be kind.  I did come across one phrase I liked:

Your tears come easy, when you’re young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you’re old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.

Such was the style of the age, right? Things got easier, thank goodness. About 25 years later, two guys named Holmes and Watson showed up in A Study in Scarlet. You might have heard of them. Probably the best-known detective and sidekick in the modern period. Without them, would Nero and Archie exist? Would Spenser have his Hawk? And how could Michael Knight manage without his Kitt?

Then we jump forward to the 20s and 30s, the so-called Golden Age of crime ficiton, dominated by the grande dames Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. In researching, I found one of the writers of this time, Ronald Knox, whose day job was Catholic priest, came up with his Ten Commands of detection fiction:

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

I especially agree with number ten. One should always be prepared for twin brothers.

In something of a backlash to Christie et al, some writers, mainly Americans, began to reshape the detective formula. Puzzle-solving novels were too…clean. The thirst for realism begat the hardboiled school. It was every man for himself and nobody trusted nobody.

First out of the gate, I discovered, was Carroll John Daly. His pulpy stories – The False Burton Combs (1922), It’s All in the Game (1923) and Three Gun Terry (1923) – all became instant hits with readers, especially his PI Race Williams. Après lui le déluge of the usual suspects —  Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy B. Hughes, Ross Macdonald, Jim Thompson. The list is long, and you still hear echoes of them in much of today’s crime fiction. Without them and the characters they created, the world would not have been blessed with Dirty Harry.

Here’s a paragraph I wish I had written, from Dorothy Hughes’s classic In A Lonely Place. Which was also a helluva movie starring Bogart and Gloria Grahame.

Once he’d had happiness but for so brief a time; happiness was made of quicksilver, it ran out of your hand like quicksilver. There was the heat of tears suddenly in his eyes and he shook his head angrily. He would not think about it, he would never think of that again. It was long ago in an ancient past. To hell with happiness. More important was excitement and power and the hot stir of lust. Those made you forget. They made happiness a pink marshmallow.

Where did things go from there? Wow, that’s a topic for another post, maybe part II, since this one is running long. And I am still heavy into research mode, only up through the 60s so far. I have learned that our genre has grown many, many twisted and bountiful branches. I’ve been doing this Edgars banquet gig for about 25 years now, and every year, when I see the new list of nominees come out, I am amazed at the variety and vitality I see. It seems to me that crime fiction, since the 2000s, has become ever more inclusive, exotic, richly textured and, yeah, I’ll go there — less dependent on cliches, stereotypes, and worn tropes.

So, now I turn to you guys. I am putting together the program and will be asking some authors to write about a particular decade in crime fiction — 1940 to the present — why they love it. I’m also having a video made that celebrates each decade of MWA’s remarkable history, which includes not just the influential books but also the standout crime TV shows and movies of each decade.

Tell me what you gravitate to — authors, characters, eras — and why it moves you. You’ll be doing me a solid, bims and fellas.