Detective work is a profession that is both romantic and mundane. Countless mediocre TV series have made it mundane, while great literature has made it romantic. 20 April is considered the birthday of the detective genre in literature.
It was on that day in 1841 that Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was published, introducing the private investigator C. Auguste Dupin. Without the Dupin stories there would be no such famous characters as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Commissaire Maigret and others.
Poe not only founded a new genre but also defined its main features and discovered the mechanism by which a detective story works on the reader.
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” first set out the essentials of the detective story:
an observant, analytical detective;
his companion and narrator;
unprofessional official investigators;
a mysterious crime;
an unexpected solution.
In 1887 came Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet”, the first appearance of the brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle described in detail the chain of logical reasoning a detective builds during an investigation — and that was his innovation.
After Holmes came the “Golden Age of detective fiction”, the era in which most classic detective novels were written. This period (mainly the 1920s and 1930s) is associated chiefly with British and American literature. The list of “golden” authors is headed by giants of the genre such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and G. K. Chesterton in England, and Rex Stout, John Dickson Carr and Erle Stanley Gardner in America.
Strangely enough, for readers who had lived through the First World War and the other social and political upheavals of the early 20th century, it was the detective story that offered a sense of comfort and safety. The works of Golden Age authors were even called “cosy”. A cosy mystery means an empathetic detective, the inevitable triumph of good and justice, plain language and an intimate setting. Incidentally, Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” is considered the finest “golden” detective novel.
By the mid-20th century the genre was changing. Detective fiction became more realistic and filled with social content and psychoanalysis. Whereas the classic English crime is intimate in character and takes place in a refined world, the new American “hard-boiled” genre openly flexed its muscles. The detectives portrayed by its creators, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, are misanthropes and cynics who do not believe that justice will prevail, and their driving motive is money.
A line from Hammett:
— You know, the moment I saw you I knew that one day I’d come back to you.
— You’re an angel! If you’re lucky, you’ll be out in 20 years and you can come back to me. I hope they don’t hang you, sweetheart. It would be a shame to spoil such a pretty neck…
Imagine Holmes or Poirot saying something like that.
In the second half of the 20th century, one of the best-known detective writers was the Belgian Georges Simenon, author of romans policiers. He gave France its own national Holmes — Commissaire Maigret. There was nothing superhuman about Maigret: a man of the people, like everyone else, but wise in the ways of the world and loyal to the law. Maigret’s strength lay in his excellent understanding of human psychology. He saw the root of a crime ripening in family conflicts, envy, revenge, moral impotence, ambition, cowardice or sex. And, of course, Simenon’s novels had a special character of their own — Paris.
The 21st-century detective story is far harsher and bloodier than its predecessors. Screen adaptations of Scandinavian crime fiction, known for its dark, oppressive atmosphere and ambiguous characters (by authors such as Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø), are especially popular on streaming services. The modern detective no longer opposes the police but works with them or is a police officer himself. He has become more vulnerable and has earned the right to make mistakes. Advances in technology and science and the arrival of the internet have become powerful tools in his hands, but criminals have also become more sophisticated and cunning. As a rule, they are sociopathic maniacs with severe psychological trauma and a desire to play bloody charades.
In the USSR the detective story was frowned upon. “This literature is ‘spiritual poison’: it teaches the reader to see in life nothing but a game of chance, and in the police the only force capable of restoring order,” Gorky railed against the genre. The rare examples of Soviet detective fiction followed a formula: agitprop — a moralising militia officer, good to the bone (no individualist private eyes) — more agitprop. The only exception was Vysotsky as Zheglov.
We asked Hayk Gabrielyan — founder of the first and only detective agency in Armenia, President of the Association of Private Detectives of Armenia and President of the International Association of Private Detectives — to tell us how the detective element plays out in real life. As it happens, Mr Gabrielyan’s birthday coincides with the birthday of the detective genre.
— Why is the detective genre so popular?
— To be honest, the popularity of detective stories is very simple. People have always wanted to know what is really going on behind the scenes. Who is lying, who is playing a role, where the truth lies. A detective story gives you three feelings:
— you start noticing details, as if you were conducting the investigation yourself;
— you experience risk safely;
— and most importantly, the truth comes out in the end.
In life that doesn’t always happen. In a detective story it almost always does. That’s why people love it — because deep down everyone has the same question: “What’s really going on?”
— Holmes is the archetypal British detective, Nero Wolfe represents American private investigation, Maigret is France. Who is the literary embodiment of the Armenian detective?
— In my view, the hero of Viktor Balayan’s stories, militia officer Grigor Danielyan, is considered the hero of Armenian detective fiction. He was a real person who held fairly senior posts in Armenia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Soviet period. I think that, as a police detective, he resembles Maigret.
— To quote Conan Doyle: “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” Yet there is Occam’s razor, which holds that the simplest explanation is the most likely. Which approach has proved itself?
— Occam’s razor works well at the hypothesis stage. It helps cut away unnecessary versions and avoid drowning in fantasies. Conan Doyle’s approach (through Sherlock Holmes’s logic) works at the verification stage, because the “obvious” is most often planted to hide the real picture. In real work, a combination pays off:
first Occam: build the simplest, most logical version;
then Doyle: start doubting the obvious and check every detail.
So the practitioner’s answer is this: it isn’t one approach that wins, but the ability to switch between them at the right moment.
— Next, a line from Simenon: Maigret realised with terrifying clarity that you could instantly paralyse several people at once with a simple question: “What exactly were you doing between six and seven in the evening?” Can compromising material be found on anyone?
— Maigret’s line hits the nail on the head: a question about a specific period of time throws a person off balance, because that is where inconsistencies come to light. But the conclusion that “you can find dirt on anyone” is too simplistic and dangerous.
In practice, what you can find is not dirt but a weak spot or a contradiction — everyone has one. It may be a forgotten detail, a mistake, an inaccuracy, not necessarily something criminal.
The difference is fundamental: an amateur looks for dirt, a professional looks for the truth and the facts.
And it is the precise question, like Maigret’s, that usually yields more than any “digging for dirt”.
— A line from Raymond Chandler: when a very beautiful woman with narrowed eyes walked into my office, I knew right away the day was going to go badly. Have you come across beautiful, dangerous women in your work?
— Chandler’s line is very true to life. Beautiful women have often come my way in my work.
According to global detective statistics, which have been kept for over 100 years, most private detectives’ clients are women.
And I’ll say it plainly: the most dangerous is a woman with suspicions and jealousy.
She is the best detective in the world.
— One scholar of the genre said: “A good detective story is when they search not for the criminal but for God.” Do you agree?
— It’s a beautiful phrase, but speaking as a practitioner, it’s more about philosophy than about the job.
A detective doesn’t search for God. He searches for the truth where it is being deliberately hidden.
In good cases you really do go beyond “who is to blame”. You begin to understand why it happened, where the person broke, where they lied to themselves, where they took the first wrong step. That is where it stops being just an investigation and becomes an attempt to understand human nature.
So I’ll put it this way: a good detective story isn’t about searching for God, but about searching for a truth that cannot be hidden from.
Eva Ghazaryan
Read at the source (in Russian): “A good detective story is about the search for a truth that cannot be hidden from”