The Birth of the Detective Novel from the Spirit of Science

An exclusive translation of the work of Rustеm Vakhitov

“They Did Not Expect Him” by Ilya Repin

The following is an exclusive translation of Russian author Rustеm Vakhitov’s essay provided to us by Simone Weil Center co-founder Paul Grenier. The essay first appeared in Russkaya Istina, Feb. 13, 2024.

Introduction

The birth of the detective novel from the spirit of science?

At first glance, it may seem that the connection I am drawing between science and detective stories is something artificial. After all, science is a serious matter, whereas detective fiction – the ‘crime story’ -- is generally considered a lightweight genre. People read such stuff on buses and subways, viewing it as a simple pastime, as entertainment. This latter judgment, incidentally, is incorrect.  Many leading members of the intellectual elite are devoted fans of detective stories!  What is more, as Richard Freeman once noted, although such stories are read by everyone, the connoisseurs of detective stories, as a rule, are representatives of the intellectual professions. They are scholars in the humanities, doctors, lawyers — in short, the kind of people who enjoy solving logical puzzles.

As it happens, the connection between science and the detective genre is extremely close. It was within societies where the scientific revolution had already occurred,  and where science and its inherent type of rationality were highly valued that the detective story first arose.  Let us recall, furthermore, that this is a very young genre; the first person to write detective stories was the 19th century American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe. Neither in antiquity, nor in the Middle Ages, nor in the Renaissance, nor even in the early modern period were detective stories being written (although it is believed that individual anticipations of the genre can be found even in the Bible and also in Greek tragedy) and this is no accident — a bit later I will try to explain this.  But to start with, I propose we first take a careful look at how the spirit of science influenced and even gave rise to the detective story.

We start, naturally enough, with the figure of Sherlock Holmes. While it is true that, chronologically speaking, the first detective hero was Auguste Dupin, invented by Edgar Allan Poe, fate has so willed it that it was Sherlock Holmes, the detective as investigator, who has become the very embodiment of the detective novel hero and its chief protagonist.

The Disenchantment of the World

There is one feature in the stories about Sherlock Holmes which, of course, attracts attention and has even given rise to many jokes, but few people understand the heart of the matter. I am referring to the circumstance that, by profession as well as by vocation, Sherlock Holmes is a scientist who conducts research in the field of natural science, primarily chemistry and medicine. When he first meets Watson, we learn that Holmes is working as a laboratory assistant in a hospital, where he is considered an impassioned devotee of science, albeit one with some strange interests.

True, in a conversation with Watson that takes place later, Holmes refers to himself as a “consulting detective,” but then it turns out that he defines this as a kind of craft to which he applies his extensive (albeit unsystematic) scientific knowledge and methods. It is obvious that he enjoys investigating crimes as something to pass the time in between his scientific studies. He is simply having fun: for him this is more like a hobby, an opportunity to dispel boredom by testing out his research method – the famous “deduction.” Holmes, as befits a 19th-century scientist, is very much a skeptic and is completely devoid of religious feeling. However, the first impression he makes on those around him is that he is a magician.  Simply by looking at someone, or even by only looking at their footprint, he is able to discover a very great deal about a person’s appearance, character, and life.

My use of the word “magician” just now was not by chance. Holmes, in his newspaper article, recommends a person like himself in exactly this way: “ … So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes by which he had arrived at them they might well consider him as a necromancer” … Moreover, Holmes really enjoys misleading others in this way; he likes the effect it produces. But it is no less of a pleasure for Holmes to expose the truth that behind this seemingly mysterious ability of his, which gives rise to the suspicion that he commands supernatural powers, lies nothing more than simple observation and logic!

Let us also recall that many of the cases he investigates begin with mysterious, almost mystical events, such that at first, while reading the story, one cannot help but think that it closely resembles an English “Gothic novel” (Arthur Conan Doyle himself admitted that he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles in imitation of the “Gothic novel”). But as a result of the of the skeptical Holmes’ investigations, suddenly a very prosaic, “earthly” explanation comes to light.

The very first Holmes story was A Study in Scarlet. There the police find the corpse of a rich American, and next to him, on the wall, there is an inscription in blood – “Revenge”. We have here a clear reference to the Bible, where there is a story about an inscription in blood that automatically appears on a wall. In addition, the inscription is made in German – what is this if not an allusion to the German romantics with their cult of medieval mysticism? In the end, it turns out that spirits and ghosts have nothing to do with it. The underlying explanation is an unhappy romance, and to the extent that there is a connection with religion, it is with such a peculiar religion as Mormonism.

The Adventure of the Speckled Band at first seems to be a story about the strange deaths of young women, and the narrative evokes otherworldly associations due to the mention of a colorful ribbon and a mysterious whistle. Holmes finds out that behind all this lies the self-interest and cruelty of the girls’ stepfather and a poisonous snake that he has tamed (and, by the way, it is in The Speckled Band that Holmes stipulates that he is interested only in unusual and even fantastical cases).

The Hound of the Baskervilles is an openly mystical legend about a diabolical creature and the curse of an entire family line. The novel’s denouement brings the reader both disappointment and at the same time relief at the discovery that, in the end, the diabolical hound is nothing more than an ordinary dog smeared with phosphorus.

Finally, in The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual, the cause of the mysterious events in the castle turns out to be a scam perpetrated by the butler and the maid.

These examples could be multiplied, but their overall meaning, it seems, is clear enough: one of the central ideas of the Sherlock Holmes stories boils down to the fact that everything that appears mysterious, mystical or supernatural – from the behavior of Holmes himself to the strange events that he encounters – can be explained easily and simply and has completely natural causes. For a scientist, this stance is quite understandable, given that one of the most important functions of modern science, and thanks to which this science has produced a quite tangible mental revolution, is the function of exposing and disenchanting the world (the term used by the German sociologist Max Weber).

In the medieval civilization that existed prior to scientific modernity, the world was inhabited by God, angels and demons, by spirits and ghosts. The sun and the stars, wind and earth all presented themselves to man as living beings with whom one could communicate; and even a sword had its own name and character and did not obey just anyone. But then mechanistic experimental natural science was born and the veil of mystery fell from the world. It turned into a collection of dead atoms connected by soulless forces that can be described mathematically (incidentally, the method of the new science is hypothetical-deductive – in other words, it is a matter of “elementary deduction”). What took place, in other words, was Weber’s disenchantment of the world.

In this new, disenchanted world there are no miracles, no souls, and no life (Holmes in A Study in Scarlet directly calls life “a colorless skein”). Here we have the quantifiable, predictable world that works like a clock, but which is so boring that an intelligent person can amuse himself in it only by such diversions as solving criminal puzzles, smoking a pipe and tormenting oneself by extracting terrible noises from a violin – which is what Holmes occupies himself with in his spare time, in the evenings after returning home from his laboratory ...

A Society Under the Law

A universal system of law represents another fundamentally important condition for the emergence and existence of the detective story; what is more, it presumes a system under which violation of the law leads to a mandatory and strictly defined punishment. To people of our time, such a situation seems natural and ‘as it has always been,’ but in fact that isn’t the case at all. That everyone is equal before the law, regardless of gender, origin, race or social status, and that everyone should suffer the same punishment for the same crimes – these ideas were generated only during the bourgeois era (which was also the era of the dominance of science and technology!).

The idea of a ​​universal code of civil law was one of the main slogans of the bourgeois revolutions, particularly the French Revolution of 1789. In the pre-bourgeois era – that is to say, in feudal Europe or in antiquity – people considered it normal that an aristocrat had the right to appropriate property, and even the right to kill a commoner. In Greece and Rome, a free slave owner, the father of a family, had the right to kill not only his slaves, but also his children (who were considered his personal property) and his wife if he caught her in an act of adultery (in any case, such was the law of Rome). The very notion that if the corpse of a simple townsman was found in the street, then the authorities must immediately initiate a search for his killer, would have seemed absurd to someone living in medieval times. Therefore, the detective story as a genre existed neither in the Middle Ages nor in antiquity.

The same holds true for theft. I came across an interesting story in a book on the history of the Ottoman Empire. There was no such thing as ‘the police’ in Ottoman Turkey.  If a person was robbed at the marketplace, he had nowhere to turn.  In response to a complaint any official would have simply said “be more careful next time.” Thieves, of course, were punished, but only if they were caught red-handed, which was rare (but once caught, they were punished severely, and the extent of cruelty used was directly proportional to the current level of criminality!). But if a person still wanted to retrieve something stolen (for example, a ring with sentimental value), then one turned not to the non-existent police, but to the head of the “thieves’ guild.”  Thieves also united in mutual aid organizations similar to artisan guilds.  A thief didn’t keep his stolen loot for himself, he handed it over to the head of the “guild” and received in return his share (the rest went, for example, to the widows of deceased comrades and their children, or to ailing “colleagues,” etc.). The head of the thieves’ guild could sell back to the victim what had been stolen.  In short, this was a completely different world based on completely different rules, and within it the plot of a detective story was simply unimaginable ...

The famous French ‘sociologist of the detective story,’ Luc Boltanski, writes that the detective story is a product of the bourgeois nation-state (nation not in the ethnic, but rather in the political sense) with its civil society that arose in the West after the bourgeois revolutions. It is the actuality of this political community, with its universal law, its careful categorization of crimes and punishments, its police services (which even in Europe only first appeared in the 16th and 17th centuries!), that immortalizes the detective story as if it describes the “normal state of affairs.”  To this picture I would add that this was a time when both society and nature were imagined as universal fields where the same laws operated equally everywhere.  This is the picture of the world formed by Newtonian science. Things appeared quite otherwise, however, during antiquity and the Middle Ages. According to the Aristotelian picture of the world, there were different laws in heaven and on earth (for the sky, according to Aristotle, consists of a special, fifth element — ether). In a society where a single universal rational law was established (which was the pre-condition for the emergence and popularity of detective literature, the essence of which is retribution for violators of this law), a science arises that observes a similarly universal law operating everywhere, including throughout nature itself: Isn’t this an impressive parallel!

The Detective and the Naturalist

I mentioned earlier that the classic detective in a detective story resembles the figure of the natural scientist (and Holmes, as a chemist both by education and profession, was of course also a natural scientist). The point is not only that a good detective must understand such things as poisons, ballistics, and anatomy in order to solve the crime (or at least have expert consultants on those topics). The point is the very similarity of the detective (who, incidentally, must not be confused with actual police officers, since the “police novel” is a completely different genre) and the natural scientist born of the Newtonian scientific revolution (and this same scientist, incidentally, has little in common with his predecessor — the natural philosopher of the ancient and medieval worlds!).

What brings them together is that each of them solves a problem, a kind of riddle, which is posed to the scientist by the Newtonian clockmaker god, the creator of this phenomenon and the associated laws, and which is posed to the detective by an inventive and in-his-own-way brilliant criminal, the ‘creator’ and skilled disguiser of his own crime. And the way the detective and the Newtonian physicist approach their respective problems are also similar.

One aspect of the detective novel often goes little noted: as a genre, it discourages too deep a dive into the psychology, the inner life or biography, of the criminal.   This is understandable. If you explain why the villain came to live this way, then the reader may feel sorry for him, and then the detective will cease to seem such a positive figure, such a hero who restores justice and exacts retribution. The criminal must be a villain. Of course, he has motives — jealousy, the need for money —  but they should be described schematically, mechanically and as if done by compulsion so as not to elicit disquiet in the reader’s mind. The reader should not be over-concerned with figuring out “why did the villain commit this crime?” Of far greater importance are the questions: “who committed the crime, and how?”

In general, the question “who?” is the most important thing in a detective story, and if the reader guesses who the villain is already at the beginning, then the book loses all interest for him. The question regarding “how?” is also important. It is not for nothing that the “mystery of the closed room” has become such a classic detective plot. A murder takes place in a closed room, there is no crime weapon, everyone who was in the room with the murdered man could not have committed the crime, no one entered or left. There are thousands of detective stories with just such a set-up.   

Let us now turn to the natural scientist.  What distinguishes his approach from that of the natural philosopher is that he looks, in the first place, for a causal force and a mechanical law; and he is also interested in a description of what is taking place. Newton said: “unlike Aristotle, I am not interested in the essence of gravity, I am interested in the description of the interaction of physical bodies.” Indeed, the question “why?” is characteristic of metaphysics, whereas the question “how?” is characteristic of Newtonian physics, in reference to which Sir Isaac recommended that it live, as a science, in fear of metaphysics.  Of the four causes of Aristotle’s natural philosophy — material, formal, efficient, and final — Newton left only the efficient cause, that is, the force (the analogue of which, in a detective story, is the will of the criminal who skillfully disguises a crime).

There is also another similarity, one that I have already hinted at. Newton's clockmaker god, having created the laws of nature, hides them from the prying eyes of the uneducated lay observer. The law of falling bodies, which states that acceleration is independent of the mass of the falling body, is, after all, not so obvious. A leaf from a tree falls slower than a stone.

To derive this law, Galileo had to introduce the concept of “free fall,” that is, a fall that can take place without air resistance, something which does not naturally occur in nature in this world.  To do this, you have to create an artificial situation, that is, conduct an experiment so that the law will become obvious (for example, by making a leaf and a stone fall under a glass “bell” from which the air has been pumped out). But the detective also cannot do without experiments. The criminal, after all, is the “devil of the detective novel,” and the devil, as is known, is “God’s ape” (in this case, the ape of the “Newtonian clockmaker god”) who disguises his crime, hiding the truth under “superfluous” or false facts.

The detective’s experiment may take place in his mind, or, as happens more often, take place in the real world by recreating the scene of the crime (the same people are invited, and they behave in the same way as at the time of the crime) and by this means the behavior of the criminal and his identity become apparent (taking us back to that afore-mentioned “efficient causes”).  It is this ‘experiment’ that leads to the revelation of the guilty party, just as a scientist’s experiment leads to the discovery of a cause.

Conclusion

The tight connection between the detective story and the spirit and substance of scientific research (in its Newtonian form) preordained the decline of this genre in our own time. The detective story, with its rationalist criminal and ‘battle of wits,’ has been replaced by the thriller, the main negative character of which is the cunning madman — a maniac who obeys the dark irrational elements of his own subconscious. The detective who fights against him believes not so much in reason as in brute force. The hero-detective’s struggle with the villain usually ends not with the latter being taken into custody, but with the cop, smeared in the blood of the madman he has just killed, merging into an embrace with the gorgeous young woman he has just rescued ...

The civilization that stood on the authority of science and technology, which, even if it removed transcendence from nature, still retained respect for reason, along with an — albeit humanistic — form of kindness and a sense of fairness, is becoming a thing of the past. It is being replaced by a new, postmodern pseudo-medieval age dominated by murky occultism in the spirit of the New Age. The detective story turns into the thriller; science fiction turns into fantasy … 

I regret the loss of those good old detectives who studied chemistry and anatomy instead of a popularized and vulgarly distorted (and therefore all the more understandable to the popcorn-eating viewer!) version of Kabbalah. Moreover, I even regret the passing of the former, albeit not very kind, and yet not overly bloodthirsty criminals of days gone by, with their now seemingly naïve, merely human motives, such as jealousy or monetary gain ... 

The piercing howl of the Nazgul has cast its black shadow over our cities and lands.  This new creature has as much in common with the spirit of the true Middle Ages, with its scholasticism, universities and mystics who taught mercy instead of destruction and sadism, as an innocent child has in common with a drugged-out, leering girl derisively playing the role of the ‘nymphet.’

“Oh, if only you knew, my children, the cold and darkness of coming days!” —  wrote the poet already one hundred years ago. Alas, he was probably right.

About the author:  Rustem Vakhitov (Ph.D., Philosophy) is Associate Professor at Bashkir State University in Ufa, Russia.  His research interests include Eurasianism and traditionalism.