Dorothy Sayers on the Limits of Detective Fiction
A couple of days ago I quoted Dorothy Sayers on “the desire of being persuaded that all human experience may be presented in terms of a problem having a predictable, final, complete and sole possible solution.” That desire for simplification, Sayers suggests, accounts for the popularity of detective stories.
It is significant that readers should so often welcome the detective-story as a way of escape from the problems of existence. It “takes their mind off their troubles.” Of course it does; for it softly persuades them that love and hatred, poverty and unemployment, finance and international politics, are problems, capable of being dealt with and solved in the same manner as the Death in the Library. The beautiful finality with which the curtain rings down on the close of the investigation conceals from the reader that no part of the “problem” has been “solved” except that part which was presented in problematic terms.
All fiction is a closed loop in which the writer solves problems that the writer invented in the first place. The boundaries are set, the variables are controlled. Things are quite cozy. This bounded-ness of fiction is most obvious in detective fiction. Sayers again:
The detective problem is deliberately set in such a manner that it can be solved without stepping outside its terms of reference. This is part of its nature as a literary form, and the symmetry of this result constitutes a great part of its charm.
It takes nothing away from the value of detective stories to point out that their appeal depends on simplification and schematization and the circular logic whereby a writer “exclude[s] from the problem anything the solution can’t solve.” The same is true (only more so) of every game or puzzle you have ever enjoyed.
But the principles and lessons of a game or puzzle or detective story can be easily misaspplied. It would be a mistake to “achieve mastery” in one’s life and work by shrinking one’s life and work down to something one is able to master. I have known people who choose not to travel because to travel is to give up much of the control one has at home. I have known people who organize their whole life around a few problems they know how to solve, or a few kinds of scorekeeping they feel they can win at.
Sayers writes,
The danger of speaking about life exclusively in terms of problem and solution is that we are thus tempted to overlook the limitations of this detective game and the very existence of the initial arbitrary rule that makes the playing of it possible.
If it seems strange that one of the great practitioners of detective fiction during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction would speak so dubiously of the “detective game,” I would point out that Lionel Messi, that great practitioner of soccer, probably doesn’t think that kicking a ball into a net is the essence of the Good Life beyond the boundaries of the soccer field.
Having said all that, let me also say that even if the schematization, the tight boundaries, even the problem-solution loop of detective fiction aren’t great principles for organizing a life, they do make detective stories exceedingly helpful for teaching and learning the principles by which fiction works. I hope you’ll join me for Writing with Dorothy Sayers, in which we will read and discuss six of Dorothy Sayers’s Peter Wimsey detective stories and apply the principles therein to our own writing.
Starting September 10: Writing with Dorothy Sayers
Dorothy Sayers was one of the leading lights of the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction.” Few of her peers had such high literary ambitions. In Writing with Dorothy Sayers, we will learn from this master storyteller and put her techniques and methods into practice in our own writing.
Writing With Dorothy Sayers includes six short recorded lectures, six 60-minute live Zoom discussions, as well as a dedicated online forum for discussion and writing exercises.
Dates:
Tuesdays, September 10-October 15, 2024
Times:
1-2PM Central
Watch the weekly lectures (~30 minutes) at your own convenience
Cost: $97
Intended Audience:
Adults, college-age and up (there will not be a student cohort for this class)
This was a fascinating introduction to the class. It makes me wonder if the satisfaction I get as a reader of good detective fiction is simply a yearning for the Final Judgement. I yearn for my life and the lives of those around me to make sense, for motives to be revealed, for cause and effect to be clear, and for justice, albeit justice with abundant mercy. The best detective fiction, in my amateur opinion, brings order to chaos. It hints at the time when the universe will be rightly ordered and all will be revealed.
“A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.”
~ GK CHESTERTON