DEATH IN FICTION
Death is without a doubt something that interests people very much. So much it is not even enough with the death present in our everyday life through those we know and here of that dies. We want to see it on films and television – and we love to read about it. So it is not really possible to look at death from a cultural perspective without adding something about death in literature.
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The beginning
The beginning of detective fiction
Christie, Sayers and Allingham
Hill, Walters and Peters
The beginning
As long as there has been literature there has been death present, which perhaps is not that strange. Writing has a tendency to deal with what is important to humans and death has always been an important part of life from beginning of time. The first texts has to deal with religious questions, they tell about why the world looks like it does and how the gods act. Some of the oldest texts are from ancient Sumer (in today’s Iraq) and one of these is about the goddess Inanna (in Babylonian text’s renamed Ishtar) who enters the realm of the dead to get the power of the Under-world. This done she re-enters the world of living and has her partner killed. She comes to regret it and makes a deal that will make him able to spend six months each year with her, and six months with the dead. (A way to explain the shifting seasons, just like the Greeks did with Demeter and Persephone.)
Also sudden death and murder has been present from the beginning in the literature. It is just to look as something as widely spread as the Bible. There are quite a big body-count in the Book of books, and on of the most famous ones is of course Cain and Abel in Genesis. Cain who kills his brother Abel because he is jealous of the love Abel is shown from God. Which of course also shows on of the three most common motives for a murder: jealousy – the other two being greed and love. In the New Testament there are also quite a number of descriptions of horrible deaths, from Jesus’ death on Golgata to all the apostles that died during torture trying to spread the happy message about God and his son.
Religious literature tended to flourish well into modern times, but the nature of it changed somewhat over the centuries. When we reach the nineteenth century it is a question of sermons on the moral, or lack of, and how to behave as a good Christian. But this was at a time that different genres dealt with different kinds of subjects, a sensational novel was a sensational novel, a drama was a drama and so on. When it all began back in medieval times it was not as all that simple. One very popular genre was that of saintly vitas that told how the saint had lived (most piously) and how the saint had died (mostly very gruesomely). So the young children of the middle ages who sat and studied how to live the perfect life also learnt quite a lot about terrible deaths.
The beginning of detective fiction
From The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English edited by Ian Ousby (1992):
Historians of [detective fiction] have tried to trace its origin to the puzzle tales of the Enlightenment (Voltaire’s Zadig) or even to the Bible (Daniel, Susanna and the Elders), but there is a general agreement that its real history starts in the 19th century. Edgar Allan Poe brought all the basic ingredients together in his ‘tales of ratiocination’ of the 1840s. His detective, the brilliant and eccentric Dupin, is accompanied by an obligingly imperceptive friend who narrates the story; he confronts mystery with a coherent, though not exclusively scientific, methodology of detection; and he produces the solution with a triumphant flourish that both surprises and satisfies the reader. Without providing either a murder or an infallible detective, Wilkie Collins showed in The Moonstone (1868) how the formula could be expanded to fit the requirements of the full-length novel. In his Sherlock Holmes stories, begun in the late 1880s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle masterfully orchestrated the hints Poe had sketched out.
The success of Sherlock Holmes rapidly bred imitation, raging from distinguished contributions like G.K. Chsterton’s Father Brown stories and E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913) to forgotten works like Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt stories and M.P. Shiel’s tales of Prince Zaleski. It also bred new awareness of the form, a new attempt to distinguish detective fiction from all the other types of popular fiction which dabble in crime and mystery. According to Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1857) and his followers in the Detection Club, detective fiction should be concerned with puzzles rather than crime as such, and it should elaborate its puzzles in strict obedience to the rules of logic and fair play. From such prescriptions arose the so-called Golden Age of the detective novel in the 1920s and 1930s. Writers became known for their expert refinements of the puzzle.
Setting and characterization inevitably took second place, but they, too, followed well-worn paths. Detectives tended to be gentleman amateurs rather than policemen or private enquiry agents. H.C. Bailey (1878-1961) was perhaps the first, in his Reggie Fortune stories, to make his gentleman amateur a facetious dandy, but Fortune was soon joined by a lengthening list of detectives who owed as much to Saki and P.G. Wodehouse as they did to Conan Doyle: Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L. Sayers), Albert Campion (Margery Allingham) and even Nigel Strangeways (Nicholas Blake, the pseudonym of Cecil Day.Lewis). Settings were equally genteel, with country houses and Oxbridge colleges among the favourites, and with the work of Michael Innes (J.I.M. Stewart) offering perhaps the best representative selection.
Christie, Sayers and Allingham
Agatha Christie (1890-1976)
Christie is perhaps one of the most well-known writers of detective fiction there is. She wrote 79 novels and collections of short stories and is translated to 45 languages. Her two most famous detectives are Hercule Poirot, featured in, among others, her first novel The mysterious affair at Styles (1920), and Miss Jane Marple. Many of her books has been filmed. She also wrote some romantic stories under the name Mary Westmacott.
Christie was born in Torquay, England, and first married to Colonel Archibald Christie in 1914. They had a daughter, Rosalind, and divorced in 1928. She later remarried the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. She received the Order of Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1971.
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)
Sayers is the mind behind the famous detective Lord Peter Wimsey, the prototype to so many gentlemen detectives with his noble background, expensive habits, sharp wit and aristocratic looks. She wrote 14 novels and short stories about him between 1923 and 1936, beginning with Whose body. She later abandoned detective fiction to write plays and work with translations of among others Dante’s Comedia Divina and The Song of Roland.
Sayers was born in Oxford, England, and at the time her father was headmaster at Christ Church Cathedral School. She received a scholarship and went to Somerville College, Oxford, where she graduated in 1915 with first class honours in modern languages. In 1926 she married Arthur Fleming. She worked very hard until her unexpected death from heart failure.
Margery Allingham (1904-1966)
Allingham published her first detective novel in 1929, The crime at Black Dudley , which introduced her hero Albert Campion. He was written as a parody of Lord Peter Wimsey and shares many of his immediate features. But he soon developed into a character quite of his own. In the end it was to become 19 books. She wrote books about Campion till her death and her last novel was finished by her husband.
Allingham was born in London, England. She married Philip Youngman Carter in 1927. He helped her work out many of her plots and after her death also wrote a new novel featuring Mr Campion.
Peters, Hill and Walters
Ellis Peters (1913-1995)
Peters real name was Edith Pargeter, and Ellis Peters was the name she chose to write under when writing her crime novels. The most famous ones are those about Brother Cadfael, a monk in his sixties who in the middle of the 12th century solves mysteries in the town of Shrewsbury. Cadfael is purely fiction, but other characters are based on historical persons, for example the sheriff Hugh Beringer, and the setting – the civil war between king Stephen and empress Maud is also very real. The first book in the series is A morbid taste for bones (1977) and till her death she wrote another 20 books about the monk.
She was born in Horsehay, Shropshire, England and stayed in this region all her life. She published her first novels in the 30’s and most of her books are in a historical setting though she also wrote one book on her experiences from WWII. The name Ellis Peters was based on two different sources, her brother was named Ellis and she had a Czech friend named Petra. Peters was very interested in that country, visited it many times, learnt the language and translated from Czech to English.
Reginald Hill (1936- )
Hill has up till this time written about 40 books. The most famous of these is the series about the two policemen Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, the first A clubbable woman published in 1970. But he has also written another series, this time featuring Joe Sixsmith. And under the name Patrick Ruell he has written some pen thrillers. He has received one of Britain’s finest literary awards for mystery books: the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement, and the Golden Dagger Award for the series about Dalziel and Pascoe.
He was born in the north-east of England and now lives in Cumbria with his wife since over forty years: Pat. He graduated from Oxford University with a degree in English and worked as a teacher till he abandoned it in 1980 to be a full-time writer.
Minette Walters (1949- )
Walters started to write her first crime novel, The Ice House, at the age 37 and got it published five years later. Till this date she has published 10 novels, and one long short story. The novels tend to be very chilling and some might be surprised they are written by a woman due to their nature. She has received several awards for her writing, like Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Award and the American the Edgar Allen Poe Award.
She was born Bishop’s Strotford, England. After her father’s death she went to a boarding school which was followed by studies at Durham University. After this she worked as a journalist and editor – and even at one time worked as a writer of romance-novels to be able to pay the bills! She married Alec Walters in 1978 and they have two sons.
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