The Diminutive Detective

HOW DO OUR favourite detectives come into being? Is there a method to that cre­ation? Let’s look at some of the most beloved cre­ations of our time. In Ngaio Marsh’s introduction to her first book, A Man Lay Dead, she writes that on a rainy evening in London, having enjoyed the books by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, she decided to pen (well, pencil) one herself. “I bought six exercise books, a pencil and pencil sharpener and splashed back to the flat.” Then, faced with the fact that thus far, the solver of the crime had ec­centric habits, Marsh decided to make her policeman normal, but in some ways atypical: an attractive civilised man with whom it would be pleasant to talk but much less pleasant to fall out. With a cockeyed sense of humour, schooled at Eton and generally regarded as a nice chap, Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn, CID, was born. As for the name, Marsh’s father was an old boy of Dulwich College, a school founded and endowed by a famous Elizabethan-era actor, Alleyn. And Roderick—she had visited the Scottish Highlands and liked the name Roderick MacDonald.

In ‘Private Eyes’, an essay in Martin Edwards’ edited Howdunnit, Michael Lewin tells us how he conceptualised his first private investigator. This was in 1969. Like Ngaio Marsh, he studied the prevailing trend in PI fiction. ‘He’ (it was always a man) was a tough guy available for hire to investigate problems for strangers, lived and worked alone, every woman fancied him; he believed truth and justice were more important than law and order. Lewin then took a Ross Macdonald book and analysed it, and figured out how and why it worked. Raymond Chandler used to do the same with Erle Stanley Gardner stories — even recommending that one take it apart and rewrite it for oneself. Having done all this, Lewin decided on a character who makes his own justice but is not a loner (a girlfriend and a mom who ran a luncheon­ette) or a tough guy (didn’t own a gun). In other words, the PI was familiar in some ways to a reader of that sub-genre, but also surprised the reader with other non-tough-guy character­istics (mum bakes him apple pies for lunch).

It has often been posited that to make a character memorable, give them eccentricities. Father Brown (created by GK Chesterton) had an umbrella and a deceptive air of absentmindedness; Sayers’ Lord Wimsey had a monocle and an antiquarian book collection; Holmes had his violin, cocaine, and pipe. John Curran, who delved into Agatha Christie’s notebooks, points out that Poirot emerged from a mix of what Christie was familiar with in the genre, the prevailing norm of eccentric detectives, and what she saw around her. She was familiar with Edgar Allan Poe’s Chevalier Dupin, Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin and Gaston Leroux’s Monsieur Rouletabille. In Torquay, her hometown, she saw Belgian refugees from World War I, and so when she sat down to write A Mysterious Affair at Styles, she designed Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian policeman-refugee with his moustache, little grey cells, overweening vanity and a mania for order.

Christie writes that she made Poirot a tidy little man because his creator was the opposite. Similarly, Georges Simenon’s Jules Maigret is a morally upright charac­ter created by a libertine — Simenon had a tumultuous per­sonal life. In these cases, the characters were what the author would’ve liked to be in an alternate life.

Others like Erle Stanley Gardner whose Perry Mason series delighted generations, including mine, drew directly from their own life, basing the character on himself as a lawyer. The two women who were his secretaries and whom he married 56 years apart, were the model for Della Street. Gardner did a similar analysis of the prevailing norm in crime fiction of the 1920s, and decided to buck the trend. According to a Los Angeles Times article on Gardner, he wrote to William Morrow publishing house and proposed a mystery series where the main detective wouldn’t be the usual tough guy (made popular by Dashiell Hammett) but a patient crime-solving lawyer. “I want to make my hero a fighter, not by having him be ruthless with women and underlings, but by having him wade into the opposition and battle his way through to victory,” Gardner wrote. “I’m calling him Perry Mason and the character I’m trying to create for him is that of a fighter who is possessed of infinite patience. He tries to jockey his enemies into a position where he can deliver one good knockout punch.” Above all he wanted a character who sprinted the “whole darned way” to the finish line.

It has often been posited that to make a character memorable, give them eccentricities. Father Brown (created by GK Chesterton) had an umbrella and a deceptive air of absentmindedness; Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Wimsey had a monocle and an antiquarian book collection; Sherlock Holmes had his violin and pipe

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This emphasis on the knight errant to the rescue is a trope embraced by more recent authors. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is one such avatar who never changes during the series. That is because the author put effort into stopping Reacher from changing. Why? Because as a reader, Child loved reading a series for the familiarity and wanted that for his own readers. “It’s like putting on a comfortable old sweater. They know what they are going to get.”

But unlike Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Lewin who system­atically decided on their main detective’s characteristics, for Lee Child, it was a blind process. When asked how he came up with Jack Reacher, he said he “metaphorically closed his eyes and wrote about whatever came out.” Retrospectively, “I look at the character as an update of a very old figure who came out of one thousand years of literary tradition — the loner, the mysterious stranger, the knight errant who shows up, solves a problem and then leaves. He [Reacher] came out of the Scandinavian sagas and English tales of knights and survived into the American West and popular literature.” As for the name, Lee Child’s wife suggested it after he lost his broadcasting job. With his size (Child is 6’5’’) he could be a reacher in a supermarket, she said. And Jack Reacher was born.

In the same period, Jo Nesbø, the prince of Scandi noir came up with his Harry Hole series. Hole embodies the cliché of a hard drinking, womanising, authority-hating and intelligent detective with a gut feeling for some­thing off kilter. In a Guardian interview Nesbo said he deliberately chose to make Hole a hardboiled and troubled maverick. “When I wrote my first book (The Bat), I remember think­ing about whether to make Harry one of those heroes who was a bit different in some way — gay, priest, disabled or what­ever — or to run with the stereotype of the hardboiled troubled maverick. And I deliberately chose the latter.” But by the third book in the series, he realised that there were significant areas of autobiog­raphy in the character of Harry Hole.

By now, the patterns of how beloved series characters spring into being must be evident. They include: what the au­thor is familiar with and enjoys reading, the eccentricities that have not yet been picked by the prevailing lot, autobio­graphical elements, including what the author dreams of being, and the societal ills the author wants to tackle.

Great characters are made, as Martin Solares says in How to Draw a Novel, through careful selection of a few well-chosen traits, and where possible, contradictory ones (for example, a vain and precise Poirot). “If they are well constructed, great characters produce two kinds of magnetism: on one hand they attract other beings loyal or adversarial to enrich the story; on the other, they also excite and move the reader with their responses to the challenges that face them.” The present-day rise of strong female, racially diverse, and LGBTQ detective characters as solvers, not victims of crime, promises more exciting, explosive, and boundary-busting outings for crime-fiction characters.

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes