How many distinct types (or archetypes, if you prefer) of the mystery-detective genre hero do you recognize?
I see five characters such that most of the protagonists in mystery-detective fiction seem to fall into place pretty readily. What do you think of my typology?
• Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot or Nero Wolfe. The deduction detective.
• Hardboiled Sam Spade. Rumpled, works lousy hours, gets shot at, cynical, makes some appearances in film noir, you know the type. Only one step less debased than the criminals, and knows it, but it’s an important step.
• Jane Marple or perhaps Mrs Pollifax, or Lord Peter Wimsey. Similar to Sherlock Holmes but with an endearing tendency to be inappropriate and out of place in the wicked and dangerous world of crime. You know, they look like they’d be stumblebums and even get themselves into danger and trouble, and if not that then at least get in the way of the real investigators. That Monk fellow aspires to be a Sherlock Holmes but really he belongs here.
• Travis McGee and others who aren’t jaded and cynical like Sam Spade and don’t always get the right answers from information at hand like Sherlock Holmes; instead, they dive in and take risks and poke and prod. Cecelia Grey belongs here. Earnest dedicated investigators who chew on their cases like a schnauzer working a chewie. They make mistakes and muddle through, sometimes retaliating with bursts of cleverness.
• Quincy, the one-trick pony or specialist. Shines the light of one rarefied expertise on a string of cases that each unravel in that spotlight. Gideon Oliver and his bones totally belong in here.
I’m not saying I can’t come up with a protagonist who doesn’t pigeonhole nicely — Stephanie Plum comes to mind — but the exceptions kind of prove the rule (Steph isn’t really a detective-mystery protagonist, she’s a cupcake. If she were a bit more efficient she’d be in with Monk or McGee, but more often than not she doesn’t really solve her cases, etc)
I don’t see that the difference between Travis McGee and Sam Spade is worth a separate category: that has to do with personality, not with detective type. You might as well separate Nero Wolfe from Sherlock Holmes because one stays in his office and the other examines the scene of the crime on hands and knees. Seems to me that the category is the same (I’d call it “hardboiled”) regardless of whether the detective is cyncial.
Of course, those distinctions of personality and character traits are what make each one interesting.
Stephanie Plum is arguable also “hardboiled” although she’s just not very good at it. The characters around her, Ranger and Morelli, are (IMHO) clearly “hardboiled.” She’s the comic relief (albeit the main character.)
The other type you’re missing is the Police Procedural – Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct would be the prime example, and the LAW AND ORDER TV show.
I was about to say that Ed McBain &etc is Travis McGee in uniform, but that’s not really so. The sense of documenting for a bureaucratic organization rather than being on one’s own give them a totally different feel.
I have to think about collapsing Travis McGee and Sam Spade… I know a lot of what makes the Spade archetype distinctive is indeed just personality, but they also seem to me to have a different “feel” to them… Spenser is a Sam Spade, for instance, but Jessie Arnold’s a Travis. Let me see if I can make the distinction in a manner more useful than a vague wave of the hand towards “feels” and I’ll get back to you.
One step below Sam Spade is the Anti-Hero–Works outside the law to stop those who can’t be stopped within the law. Andrew Vachss’s Burke is the zenith (or nadir) of this type.
And of course there’s the Singing Texas Jewboy Detective Kinky Friedman ;j
I’m not sure which catagory he fits into.
It looks to me like your classification falls along the lines of how the detectives get their results—how they do their work, what makes them effective.
Your category #1 (Holmes, Poirot, Wolfe): through an almost superhuman intelligence, that enables them to see things and piece them together before anyone else does.
Categories #2 & 4: (Spade, McGee): through hard work, bravery, and dogged determination. (Like C K Dexter Haven, I’m tempted to lump your two categories together, but if you have a way of distinguishing them, I’d like to hear it.)
Category #3: (Marple, Wimsey; Father Brown is another good example): through insight into human nature, wisdom, a sort of instinct for solving crimes.
Category #5 (Quincy): through specialized skills or expertise in some particular area.
The only practical differences I see in character types 2 & 4 is the setting. If the Sam Spade-ish characters are set and act in the time honored world of noir, pre-WWII pulp fiction, intrigue, highly paternalistic attitude towards women’s roles, they’re in type 2. Post WWII and the modern age, with access and use of modern electronics and law enforcment techniques, are character types 4.
The difference in time acknowleges the influence and popularity of the pre-war noir detctive archetype through WWII.
There’s some justification for seeing an archetype strictly as part of a specific time/place (i.e. cowboys, medieval knights, Mammy-type slaves)
OK, I’m convinced. Sam and Travis get lumped together into a single muddle-through / take-risks kind of way of solving mysteries. And Ed McBain and others of that ilk get added in so I still get to keep referring to my five characters
Gotta be a category for Dirty Harry, Martin Riggs, Starsky and Hutch - ass-pull informants are their stock-in-trade. That and Fiersum Weppins. (Or cars. Or explosions. It’s all good).
I’m not terribly up on my Agatha Christie, but wouldn’t Poirot join Marple in #3? IIRC, he’s very intelligent, but most of his results come from understanding people instead of deducing the circumstances like Holmes.
Poirot wouldn’t be impressed at the thought of landing in the same bucket as Sherlock, would he??
Yes, quite possibly. Poirot is always bragging how he is unlike Holmes. How he solves crimes by sitting in his chair and exercising the “grey cells”. He chides Hastings that he is not going to look for the cigar ash or measure footprints. However, Poirot doesn’t quite fit in the bumbling-but-perceptive description of category 3. Poirot and Marple use the same techniques, but others perceive them quite differently.
Maybe Travis McGee should be in the same category as Spade, but category four still seems useful to me. It best describes the category for Jim Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leephorn.
I think you’re being a bit hard on Lord Peter, here. He’s pretty breathtakingly competent at everything he does, at least by the end of his career. I’ll admit that the Lord Peter we’re introduced to is pretty different from the Lord Peter we bid farewell to at the end of Busman’s Honeymoon (or the later short stories), but even in the course of his investigations into the body in the bathtub he doesn’t do any actual bumbling that I can think of. You want to call his approach more intuitive than Holmes’s and I could go along with you-- although he does do a fair bit of footprint tracking, fingerprint-dusting, and magnifying-glass-peering – but if you want to characterize him as bumbling I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to step outside.
Did you mean Cordelia Gray (from the P. D. James novels The Skull Beneath the Skin and An Unsuitable Job For A Woman), or someone else I’ve never heard of?
Where does Perry Mason fit in your categorization? A Quincy type?
I’d say Perry Mason is “police procedural” – except it’s courtroom rather than police lab.
And any time you have categories, there’s bound to be exceptions and overlap. The original definition of Category 3 (Marple) was “inappropriate, out of place”: hence, Peter Wimsey (the young lordling who interferes in crime cases as a hobby) fits that one better (IMHO) than “intellectual detective” like Poirot or Holmes.
If it’s the crime-solving method that distinguishes, then you might separate the armchair detective (Wolfe, Poirot) from the clue-gathering detective (Holmes.)
Perry Mason… good question. In some ways it’s Travis McGee in attorney’s clothing, but with less vulnerability and more always-comes-out-on-top. (Although I guess Paul Drake occasionally gets slugged). I guess I’ll go with C K Dexter Haven, although there’s a seat-of-the-pants intuitiveness about Mason in comparision with the McBain where there’s more of a sense of “we have standard ways of addressing whatever comes up”.
I think that there should be one more category: The Accidental Detective, the person who, going about their normal life, gets pulled into some situation or mystery and manages to “detective” their way out of it despite no prior training or experience. For obvious reasons, this does not tend to spawn series with iconic detective.
Many of Dick Francis’ novels seem to have this type of character, with someone in some racetrack-related occupation getting drawn in just over his head, and (after getting beaten within an inch of his life), solving the crime.
In some ways this character is a combination of the last three original categories. There is a little Miss Marple, some detecting out of place, but not necessarily the the good-natured battyness. Instead, there is some element of ernest doggedness and clear muddling through there isn’t usually the grittyness of a McGee type. Finally, the solution comes usually comes in major part out the character’s specialized knowledge derived from his or her everyday occupation.
These stories seem to pose the question of how would you solve the crime if you were pulled out of your ordinary life, as opposed to how you would solve it if you were an brilliant interpreter of clues, or you were a dogged investigator or you were an apparently harmless nonentity who picks up and puts together the information you seem to stumble upon, or you were some specialist in an aspect of the criminalogical arts.
Ah, but Holmes does stay in the office. According to Holmes himself, most of the problems of the day are so trivial that he needn’t even leave the sitting room, and only occasionally he bestirs himself to go to the scene to investigate. It only so happens that the tales revolve mostly around those cases where Holmes had to go out and meet people and inspect things for himself. Holmes himself even laments Watson’s selection of “sensational” crimes over the deductive ones.
I’ve been thinking about this, and I wonder if there isn’t a better way to divide the archetypes.
How about these:
The Adventurer Detective (simple but hidden clues). We’re talking about clues like “a crate of smuggled jewels in the bandit cave” or “the bloody knife” or “the jar of poison in the murderer’s medicine cabinet.” Once found, the clues admit of only a few interpretations (preferably just one). The Adventurer must go bravely into the lion’s den and find the clues one by one in order to put the case together. There are often chases, escapes, fighting, adventure, true love… Here I’m thinking of the Hardy Boys, Sam Spade, and others.
The Drawing Room Detective (clues readily available but must be interpreted). Clues are along the lines of “the dog in the night-time.” Such a detective need never leave the house or put himself in danger. He may make a few casual enquiries to provide evidence suitable for a jury trial, but the case is usually solved without the detective ever leaving the room. Sherlock Holmes typifies this approach, as does Miss Marple and Encyclopedia Brown.
The Investigator Detective (hidden clues that must still be interpreted). Typically, this sort of detective must learn about a subject not his own speciality, as Columbo learns about magicians or Qwill learns about modern art. The Investigator pursues many leads at once, picking up clues that have been left all over, and fits the clues together in multiple ways until he finally has enough at once to make the right interpretation.
I dunno, seems inadequate to me. I need to read more detective books.
Holmes isn’t exactly your drawing room detective. He actively looks for clues, and he uses inductive as well as deductive reasoning – imaging what must have taken place and looking for corroboration of it. As one of only a number of examples, in “Silver Blaze”, he is the only one to find the candle and the wax vesta in the mud, because (as he says to the astonishjment of all) that he was looking for it.
Actually, you can’t take Wolfe on his own as a “drawing room” detective, either. You gotta take the package of Wolfe plus Archie, which adds up to about one Holmes. (Or maybe a Watson and a Mycroft), and, again, you have the active clue-searcher combined with the ratiocination.
I’m not sure I agree with any of the methods of pigeonholing these detectives that you’ve come up with.
True, but irrevelant. While Holmes solved any number of cases – and probably derived the majority of his income – from cases he solves in his easy chair, the stories we are told almost always involve him going out and being vigorously involved in investigation.
All right then, Cal and Skald, then our categories have to be what the detectives actually do during the stories — disregarding what the detective’s actual job is, and eliminating how the detective claims he solves crimes.
For instance, Holmes claims to solve mysteries by deduction and by comparison to the history of prior crimes. Actually, it’s probably inductive reasoning, chemistry, logical elimination, footwork, and a ready knowledge of criminal investigation.
Miss Marple claims to solve crimes by her knowledge of human nature; and while knowing how wicked people can be might tell her whom to suspect, she does often rely on some bit of obscure knowledge to demonstrate how it was done. She ends up much the same as Holmes, relying on the history of past crimes and their methods.
The trouble is, there’s a fine line between the detective’s method and the author’s presentation of it. Do we want archetypes for the author’s style and setting and presentation of the story, or for the detectives themselves?
