"The art of self-tormenting is an ancient one, with a long and honourable literary tradition."
To perceive the taste for mystery fiction (and horror, too) as self-tormenting was a novel and intriguing view to me. How might a preference for such fiction be construed in terms of torment, of pain or torture, self-inflicted no less? Miss Sayers suggests the delight sought by the mystery aficionado may be catharsis or a purging of one's fears; one is comforted by intellectual challenge or stimulated by an exercise in horrific story-telling.
Okay. Sure. I was fifteen and the simple art of murder (as I would come to learn Raymond Chandler described it) fascinated me. I knew about Sherlock Holmes, of course, but only through the Basil Rathbone movies of the 1940s which were caught by accident on late-night television. I confess I had not yet moved on from science fiction to other genre fiction. So the Omnibus was a revelation.
When Sayers was writing in 1928, the detective story was largely an intellectual puzzle to be solved, a genteel mental exercise. The 1920s was a decade of cross-words, mathematical tricks, acrostics, enigmas, puzzle-pictures and detective stories, heavy on detection and light on characterization. The favored detectives were often wealthy amateurs with names like Reggie Fortune, Peter Wimsey, Philo Vance, who all lived in the upper floors of well-to-do apartment buildings amid a romanticized urban landscape. Little did they know that this airy realm of fair-play and ratiocination was soon to be upended by a new generation of authors named Daly and Hammett and Gardner, who were toiling in the pulp basement and producing gritty and "hard-boiled" stories.
But that was still to come (as far as the literary world was concerned) when Dorothy L. Sayers wrote her epic and important introduction to her anthology. She included classic stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (still alive in 1929!), but the majority of the authors were new to me. Chesterton, Hornung, Bramah, Bentley - I had yet to discover them.
There was more to the Omnibus, though, than stories of crime and detection. Fully half the volume was made up of tales of horror and the supernatural, which have always been not-so-distant cousins of the mystery story, like bastard step-children of an unorthodox marriage. Hadn't Poe himself dabbled in both horror and detection?
So in this way I was introduced to Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, M. R. James, Bram Stoker, and E. F. Benson and thrilled myself to sleep with stories of ghosts and witches and terrible revenge from the grave (which would be a common theme in E.C. Comics' gory stories of the early 1950s).
One collection of crime fiction could not be enough to sate my appetite for self-torment (to repeat Sayers's perverse phrase), so I began seeking others, from yard sales and thrift stores, but mainly used bookstores, until I acquired fully two dozen, a modest, but respectable collection. Many are by established authors in the genre (Ellery Queen, for instance, was an indefatigable anthologist), conveying the argument that someone who writes the darn stuff must know what he's talking about. My taste is somewhat broad, but I am most drawn to stories published before the second world war. The war is a spiritual, historical, and social demarcation point, evidenced most easily in contemporary literary and cinematic representations. It's very likely my preference for the literature produced before the epic conflict of nations was shaped by Dorothy L. Sayers herself on that long-ago day I found the Omnibus of Crime.
And so, my plan for this blog is to read and write about the more than four hundred stories contained solely in the two dozen anthologies that make up my little crime library. (Lest you get the wrong idea about me, however, these collections are not my only experiences with literature of crime and detection.) A chronological approach seemed most appropriate to my plan - in that way a literary progression might be ascertained - including influences, inspirations, perhaps even direct steals. The first selection dates from 1822 and I intend to read them all until I reach (a) the dawn of the atomic age (i.e., 1945) or (2) am overtaken by an unconquerable ennui. A bibliography of the anthologies is listed below.
