The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [369]
Stories which centre on a `detective' working out who was responsible for a crime go very much further back in history than the nineteenth century. The two earliest recorded examples appear in the Apocrypha, the semi-unauthorised appendix to the Old Testament. The History of Susanna and Bel and the Dragon have been ascribed to the first or second centuries sc. The first of these tells of how a pure and beautiful young married woman, Susanna, went privately into her garden to bathe, naked. Two judges, eminently respectable old men, have secretly been spying on her and become `inflamed with lust'. They confront Susanna with an ultimatum. Unless she agrees to `lie with them, they will tell the authorities that they have seen her committing adultery in the garden with a young man, a crime for which she would be punished by death. Susanna views accepting their proposition as a fate worse than death. The vengeful old men therefore make their false report. Everyone, including her husband, is appalled, and she is put on trial for her life. Because the two judges are such respected citizens, the case against her seems unanswerable.
Susanna is about to be sentenced to death when the young hero, Daniel, speaks up, asking for the chance to cross-examine the two accusers separately. He asks each of them just one question: under which tree in the garden did they see Susanna committing her crime? The first confidently answers `a mastick tree. When the other is brought in he says `an oak tree'. The two `monsters' are thus caught out on their blind spot, by their conflicting evidence, and are sentenced to death in Susanna's place. Daniel, the self-appointed `detective' (or counsel for the defence), wins universal acclaim and from that day forth `was held in great reputation in the sight of the people'.
By the time of Bel and the Dragon Daniel has risen to become a respected adviser to the greatest ruler of the age, King Cyrus of Babylon. But they fall out, because Daniel, a Jew, refuses to worship the Babylonian god Bel, or Baal. In the city's main temple stands a huge brass image of Bel, and every day a great heap of sacrifices is laid before it: forty sheep, masses of flour, quantities of wine. Regularly each night they disappear, which to the king proves infallibly that Bel is a true, living god. But Daniel only smiles and tells the king he must not be deceived. Cyrus loses his temper and threatens Daniel that, unless he can prove that the god does not eat the food, he will be put to death. Daniel goes to the temple with the king to present the daily offering but, before the door is sealed, he arranges for the floor to be sprinkled with ashes. When, next morning, they return, the king points triumphantly to the evidence that all the food has gone. Daniel invites him to look carefully at the floor. The ashes show the footprints of many men, women and children. The priests of Bel and their families have been creeping in during the night through a secret door, to steal the food. The king orders that those who have deceived him should be put to death and that the statue of Bel should be destroyed. Again Daniel has overcome the `monster'.
These two tales already include several devices which were to become only too familiar in later detective stories. In particular, there is the figure of the calmly confident, all-seeing detective who has worked out how the crime was committed long before anyone else in the story. Almost equally familiar, of course, was to become the way the finger of suspicion is initially pointed at someone who is innocent, until the detective eventually reveals the true culprit. But there is one crucial difference between these stories and the whodunnits of modern times. For the reader there is no mystery. Right from the start we, the audience, are let in on how the crime was committed, by whom and why: whereas in the modern versions,