The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.
Flannery O’Connor (79).
1The short story is frequently associated with mystery and secrecy. Its most renowned theorists-practitioners, when reflecting upon the genre often end up discussing the enigma at the core. For Eudora Welty, “the first thing we see about a story is its mystery. And in the best stories, we return at the last to see mystery again. . . . As we understand the story better, it is likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows more beautiful” (164). Welty invites readers to think about the effect literature might have on them. The “first thing” is undoubtedly the title of a work of fiction—that of a collection or of a specific story—and it is the reading which should clarify this initial mystery. Does it refer to a character? A specific moment? An object? A place? Why is it brought to the reader’s attention from the start? Flannery O’Connor and Nadine Gordimer also suggest that fiction relates to mystery—O’Connor sees it as “a gift,” “a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us” (81), while Gordimer associates it with “the mystery of life,” which science may help elucidate but whose other, unknown, story keeps titillating the imagination (179).
2Writers of detective fiction, and more specifically short fiction, may be said to double up on the aforementioned ideas for they actually pen mystery stories. Otto Penzler, the series editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories, explains: “[i]t has been my practice to define a mystery story as any work of fiction in which a crime or the threat of a crime is central to the theme or plot.” However, he goes on to explain that, at times, there might be “greater emphasis . . . on why a crime was committed, or if it will be done at all, than on trying to discover the perpetrator” (xi). Joyce Carol Oates obviously concurs when she opens the introduction of the 2005 Best American Mystery Stories with two short, sharp, and chiasmic sentences: “Crimes can occur without mystery. Mysteries can occur without crimes” (xiii). Oates then acknowledges that she “can appreciate the powerful attraction of mystery as art: it’s the formal, mediated, frequently ingenious and riveting simulacrum of the unexplained in our lives, the haphazard, hurtful, confusing, tragic.” In Oates’s view, “the unexplained” is akin to violence of a psychological kind in that it creates frustration and pain but, more importantly, it stimulates the mind, grabs the attention: “A crime or mystery novel is the elaboration of a riddle to which the answer is invariably less gripping than the riddle” (xiv). When it comes to shorter works, Oates and Penzler feel that “what ‘happens’ is [not always] primarily the point”: mystery stories are not “driven by plot at the expense of probably and plausibility” (xvi). More often than not, something escapes the reader’s attention, something remains impenetrable.
3Modern detective fiction is usually considered to have started with Edgar Allan Poe’s three Dupin short stories, and it is certain that the Sherlock Holmes short stories in The Strand magazine brought the new genre to the attention of the world. Other notable writers who helped shape the genre in the early twentieth century, including G. K. Chesterton and Melville Davisson Post, stuck to the short form and managed both to innovate and to produce works that are still appreciated today. As Charlotte Arnautou explains, Chesterton himself “hailed [detective fiction] as ‘the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life’” (294). Rather than having a detective solve a riddle that would bring order back to the world, though, “Chesterton repeatedly frustrates the reader’s desire for familiar conventions and reassurance” (298); much “is left unexplained, . . . [d]eduction is made relative, and although still effective, it is insufficient, as such to relieve the tension created in the story” (299). This is especially true in the Father Brown stories for Chesterton resorts to “the figure of [a] priest [which] allows two qualities associated with metaphysics to collide: the spiritual and the supernatural” (302)—leaving both his detective and the reader in doubt. Mystery is likely to remain central and bound to the very effect the short tale produces. For Ellery Queen, writing in 1942, it was still possible to state that “the original, the ‘legitimate’ form” of detective fiction “was the short story” (477) and to perceive the detective novel as an inflated short story because it is generally episodical.
4Poe’s Dupin stories, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, and Chesterton’s Father Brown stories can be taken as short story cycles with their unity of place, action, and character. In Memories and Adventures, Doyle explains that he felt creating a series “would bind [readers] to [a] particular magazine” (qtd. in Priestman 164), thus insinuating that initially it was a commercial tour de force he had in mind. Some authors, as Martin Priestman explains, started publishing detective short stories in magazines, but collected them only once they “had established their distinctive ‘brands’” (167), and had decided which stories would fit together and which should be discarded. Collections like Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Mr. Quin are of particular interest to pit the short story against the novel for one of its central character, “who tends to turn up as if from nowhere,” seems “not-quite-real” to Priestman. He concludes that it would be hard for such a character to survive “the exhaustive elucidations of the novel form”: “his evanescent appearances and vanishings fit well with the more liminal possibilities of the short uncanny tale” (166). Such an idea is echoed in Catherine Ross Nickerson’s observation that “[t]he mechanisms of a detective narrative are more apparent in a short story since there is less upholstery for hiding the ropes and pulleys. The shorter form also forces writers to make a more clear decision about whether to focus on the puzzle or on the character” (433). Dorothy L. Sayers’s comments on Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories go in the same direction: “the social background and the minor characters are sketched in no more elaboration than is strictly necessary to the plot” (x). The foreground is clearly more elaborated upon than the background, though what moves on the margins might hold the key to the riddle.
5Raymond Chandler, in “The Simple Art of Murder,” notes that “[t]he good detective story writer (there must after all be a few) competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well. And on almost equal terms; for it is one of the qualities of this kind of writing that the thing that makes people read it never goes out of style” (3). A good detective story is timeless—the plot was so cleverly constructed that its power of attraction will never fade. The way Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” has re-emerged over the years—inviting psychoanalytical readings since Jacques Lacan’s famous take on it (see Gallix, “Formes” 19-21)—is a case in point. When Chandler concludes his essay reflecting on the detective story as being a “man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure” (18), he seems to also be referring to avid readers who seek adventure, stories that take them away from their ordinary lives. Chandler’s detective, as Joyce Carol Oates puts it, “is a kind of savior, all that other men are not, the object of their envy, adulation, and desire” (Where 100); he is “a fantasy figure” who might be compared to “an ‘invisible’ man or a supernatural being with fairylike powers of observation, intuition, mobility, survival” (101). These qualities are also expected of the good reader who should ideally learn something from the story—be a better observer, be more intuitive… Whether a crime or mystery story involves an actual detective or not does not seem to matter so much because the reader is the real detective, the one who gives meaning to the story by symbolically dissecting it. Even in the most ordinary settings, mystery is everywhere—for example, “[o]n the image of home as sanctuary [Wilkie] Collins superimposes an image of the home as a nest of secrecy, dissimulation, and criminality” (Trodd 44, qtd. in Harrington 15). Many of the stories discussed in the present issue are set in a homely environment that suddenly becomes unhomely because an outside threat has insinuated itself inside.
6While doing research on Graham Greene’s papers at the Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas, François Gallix discovered an unfinished murder mystery which was subsequently serialized in The Strand (2009-2010) under the title of its first section, “The Empty Chair.” Since Greene had never completed the story, the magazine editor decided to launch a contest and invited writers to submit potential endings, the most impressive of which would eventually be printed. If the idea of a contest is in itself interesting, the publication of an unfinished piece of fiction is even more so. As Gallix explains, “it is for the reader to decide if a clue is worth taking into account in order to find the culprit or if it is merely a decoy” (“Mystère” 94; our translation). Greene often aims for open endings (as noted by Gallix) and in a JSSE interview, he remarks that to him it is “the most difficult thing to achieve” (13). With the publication of “The Empty Chair,” Gallix thus completes Greene’s goal and gives readers the power to choose the way the story ends. We are all thankful for Gallix’s dedication to literature and, today, we feel his absence strongly as we look at this empty chair and wonder if it truly is empty—“Here is truth,” as a Greene character suggests, but “What is truth?” François Gallix asks (“Mystère” 96).
7Some readers, writers, and critics seem to prefer the longer form—Greene himself confesses that he does not “feel at home in the short story” because “some of the charm of writing a novel is that you don’t know everything which is going to happen” (12). For P. D. James, this is because novels give “opportunities for even more complicated plotting and more fully developed characters” and because writers “if visited by a powerful idea for an original method of murder, detective or plotline, were unwilling—and indeed still are—to dissipate it on a short story when it could both inspire and form the main interest of a successful novel” (50). In spite of this, short crime fiction still has enthusiastic readers, as has been proved by Martin Edwards’s and Mike Ashley’s numerous commercially successful anthologies, which combine long forgotten gems unearthed from various archives and stories on a particular theme written by contemporary authors. Two collections of P. D. James’s own short stories, published posthumously, have also sold extremely well; the prolific Joyce Carol Oates comes to mind as well for she regularly brings out collections of “mystery and suspense” stories which are instant successes on both sides of the Atlantic.
8Short crime fiction is published in various contexts. Sherlock Holmes’s unexpected resurrection from the Reichenbach Falls is probably the reason for many authors preferring the open series, with a beginning but no end except the author’s death, like Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. Several authors have, however, produced closed collections like Agatha Christie’s Labours of Hercules or Chesterton’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. Others, like Ellery Queen, have found the short format ideal for radio or television episodes. For authors who mainly write novels, like Ellis Peters and Kate Charles, a short story may provide a useful prequel or sequel to a series of novels. Equally, while detective novels are almost exclusively concerned with murder, authors frequently use the short story format to write about other, often less serious, crimes as Susan Pettigru King does in her series of stories, Crimes Which the Law Does Not Reach, published in Russell’s Magazine in 1857 and 1858.
9A study day, held at the Université Catholique de Lille in the north of France on 7 October 2022 enabled fourteen researchers of five different nationalities and some twenty students to meet and discuss short crime fiction. The speakers presented papers on a wide variety of authors. Most of those contributions are to be found in this volume after Gavin Cologne-Brooks’s prefatory comments. We want to thank the JSSE peer reviewers for their stimulating and constructive remarks on the articles included here and the authors for going through the necessary adjustments and making the publication of this special section possible.