Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [133]
These characteristics are already present in The Moonstone, Collins’s masterpiece. The crime was the theft of a fabulous diamond. The real villain’s name comes out only in the last few pages; he turns out to be an upper-class character in the novel who had been leading a double life for years.47 One character in The Moonstone is an actual detective, Sergeant Cuff. In the “detective-story” the person who ferrets out the crime and uncovers the secrets may be a genuine crime-worker or a cunning amateur. In later years, the “detective” in such stories could be anyone imaginable—a lord or lady, a village spinster, like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple; a priest; a rabbi; a stockbroker; a blind man; heaps of lawyers; men, women, and children; the list is endless. I am not aware of a dentist detective, but there must be one somewhere. Through all this, however, the essence of the story remains nonetheless the difference between the surface world and the hidden world, and the ability of some men and women to glide noiselessly in between.
Thus the “double life,” the hidden identity, is at the heart of the detective story, just as it is at the heart of crimes of mobility in general. In this sense, popular literature, like criminal justice, reflected the norms of the general society, the context of daily life. In modem, anonymous, anomic society, one cannot rely on appearance, on social markers, on accent, on anything, to tell good from evil, human from subhuman, saint from murderer.
The detective story, then, is the fictional version of the work of the real-life detective—very stylized, very formulaic, but related, nontheless. Both reflect a fluid, restless, mobile social system, with endless possibilities for false identity, mysterious origins, strange secrets. The detective (amateur or professional) cuts through to the hidden core. His or her skill consists of reading tiny clues to sniff out identities. Sherlock Holmes was the ultimate master. In The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), a man calls on Holmes while he is out and leaves behind his walking stick. Holmes returns and deduces that his caller was a country doctor, “under thirty, amiable, unambitious, absent-minded, and the possessor of a favourite dog, which I should describe roughly as being larger than a terrier and smaller than a mastiff.” In The Leavenworth Case, Ebenezer Gryce, a much dimmer American detective, looks at the way a gun was wiped clean and decides the killer could not have been a woman; he thus rules out the two beautiful Leavenworth cousins, who were prime suspects in the killing of their uncle.
These are heightened and exaggerated forms of the feats of a man like McWatters, a true detective of New York. Class and character were easily imposed and disguised; but they did leave behind a residue, as fragile as an ash or a smudge. The clever detective was able to decipher the code, peel away the outer covering, find the telltale marks, and reveal the underlying reality. As we have already noted, the idea of “born criminals” became popular toward the end of the century, along with a “science” of criminal anthropology and anthropometry, which claimed that the born criminal could be identified through physical signs, shapes of the skull, and the like (see, further, chapter 15). But these were low, vulgar, atavistic brutes, who committed crimes because it was in their blood. The higher class of criminal gave off a more subtle kind of signal: these were men and women of good family whose character had curdled—the confidence men, the forgers and imposters, the swindlers and rogues. They were people of misused, perverted talent. Among the criminal class, according to Allan Pinkerton, were “men of powerful minds, of strong will, and of educational advantages which, if correctly applied would have enabled them to make their mark in the professional and business circles of the community,”48 Here was, of course,