Translator’s preface
This is a short essay by Kiyoshi Kasai on the works of S. S. Van Dine and how they relate to the problem of perspective in mystery fiction. Quite a bit less in-depth than the last essay I translated. But, the benefit of this is that it is much, much more approachable than that was. This one is just about mystery fiction rather than any elaborate cultural theories.
For this particular essay, it is worth explaining a particular habit of Kasai’s that is not shared among basically any of his fellow mystery fiction theorists. There is some disagreement among critics in regards to whether the surge in classic-style mystery fiction that were released in Japan throughout the 1990s should be called the ‘shinhonkaku’ movement, or whether the (arguably) more inclusive label of honkaku renaissance is appropriate. As a general rule, Kasai opts for neither of these options. Instead, he refers to works from this era as the “Third Wave,” shortened from the third wave of Japanese detective fiction.
The prior two waves for those who are curious are as follows: Firstly those of the era of Edogawa, Ranpo and others, from the era before and around the Second World War, are called the First Wave. The Second Wave is the era from 1960 to 1987, which was dominated by shakai-style mystery fiction.
Kasai’s choice of terminology is not very descriptive, but I have nonetheless kept it as-in for this translation in order to capture his idiosyncratic tendencies.
Anyway, that’s enough throat clearing. Same as last time, any of my own notes will be bracketed like [this].
This essay contains a major spoiler for S. S. Van Dine’s The Bishop Murder Case and incredibly minor spoilers for his The Greene Murder Case.
The Peculiar Role of the Watson, by Kiyoshi Kasai
In the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, S. S. Van Dine was the most successful author of honkaku-style detective fiction from the United States. However, he was gradually forgotten in the period after the Second World War. This fate was the precise inverse of that faced by Ellery Queen.
Even in Japan, the story of S. S. Van Dine is one of gradual decline. For example, prior to the Second World War, the author Shirou Hamao said of Van Dine:
Once Van Dine emerged, the mainstream of detective fiction became so well defined that there ceased to be any need to search for an alternative path.
At the time of its release, The Bishop Murder Case was considered a ground-breaking work. In 1999, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine published its final Japanese edition. A major draw was a ranking of the “100 all-time best translated [to Japanese] mysteries.” In this list, The Bishop Murder Case was Van Dine’s most acclaimed work at seventeenth place, followed by The Greene Murder Case at forty-two. Compared to Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen who both have two works each in the top 10, Van Dine’s results can only be regarded as a disappointment.
For further context, S. S. Van Dine’s The Bishop Murder Case was ranked third in Edogawa, Ranpo’s own ranking of the top 10 golden era mysteries—which was published in 1974. Van Dine’s work was only being beaten out by The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux in second and The Red Redmaynes by Eden Phillpotts in first. Not long after this, The Bishop Murder Case was ranked ninth in a top 100 list by Weekly Bunshun, published in 1985.
Among the generation that led the Third Wave, the golden age writers that most inspired them are generally names such as Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr. As for S. S. Van Dine, the following assessment by Rintarou Norizuki could be considered the current consensus:
Van Dine’s theory of mystery fiction as developed in The Great Detective Stories was profound and ground-breaking. By comparison, his actual fiction was decidedly subpar. Overall, they give the feeling of incomplete works. Technically speaking, their lacklustre composition and opaque characterisation make for works that are most notable for their historical value. Above all of this though is their failure in the principles of fair play that Van Dine emphasises so much in his critical writings. Philo Vance, the famous series detective, relies on self-indulgent and sometimes unconvincing acts of psychological analysis in order to facilitate his deductions.
I cannot offer any fundamental objection to this assessment. However, to be precise, beyond S. S. Van Dine’s epoch defining contributions to detective novel theory, he also achieved something remarkable with his combination of puzzle fiction and gothic fiction in The Greene Murder Case. Detective fiction originally emerged against the backdrop of the urban sprawl of Paris, but Van Dine developed the solemn setting of the English country manor filled with anachronisms via the Greene Mansion. From Ellery Queen’s The Tragedy of Y to Mushitarou Oguri’s The Black Death House Murders to the trend of house murders during the Third Wave, many later generations owe a great deal to Van Dine’s original innovation.
In addition, regarding The Bishop Murder Case, the motive for the crime is developed in terms of 20th century nihilism. The ideological emptiness of murder is depicted in a manner that is well balanced against the whimsical trope of nursery rhyme murders. As explained by the critic Takeru Setogawa:
The culprit, described as “a man in his sixties … with thick white hair combed pompadour,” has an obvious model in reality. Chiefly, Albert Einstein, who was an international idol at the time.
Quite so. There is an undeniable hint of the 20th century in the depiction of an ideologically depraved criminal who falls into the endless abyss of modern mathematics and theoretical physics.
Norizuki’s prior critique continues like so:
Vance’s explanations tend to flaunt an abundance of knowledge in order to camouflage the deficiencies in his logical reasoning. But they are neither clear nor coherent. Van Dine’s novels did not become popular due to their quality as intellectual games, but because readers were engaged by his use of tone to develop a highbrow atmosphere filled with decorative pedantry. In other words, Van Dine’s success was ironically premised on precisely those things that he disregarded in his critical writing.
But perhaps there is more meaning than this to be found from Philo Vance’s self-important, sarcastic loquacity.
Contrary to the typical formula, there are three separate Watson characters who travel about in the Philo Vance series, and who each contribute to the detective’s role in the story. Firstly, there is the fictionalised S.S. Van Dine himself, and then the attorney John F. X. Markham, and finally sergeant Ernest Heath of the police department. In terms of narration, Van Dine recounts the story in the first-person and is considered the primary Watson. However, the translucent characterisation of this Watson is rather unusual. For example, in The Greene Murder Case, the opening phrase reads “it has long been a source of wonder to me why,” but from then on, the sense of the narrator as a person completely disappears from the narrative. The interiority and subjectivity of a typical Watson is entirely missing.
After this introduction scene, there are some descriptions worded in a first-person manner such as “Vance and I, after motoring to the old Criminal Courts Building on the corner of Franklin and Centre Streets.” However, even these suggestions of a formally first-person narration slowly disappear in favour of a pure dialogue between Philo Vance and John F. X. Markham. During this time, the Watson does not say a word and does not narrate any of their own subjective opinions.
Basically, this continues until the end of the novel. It is quite possible for a reader to forget that the work is being told in the first-person at all. And this is not a unique gimmick of The Greene Murder Case; this style of narration of typical of the entire Philo Vance series.
The narrator known as S. S. Van Dine has an even more insubstantial presence than the famously “paper-thin” investigator Lew Archer created by Ross Macdonald. The Watson characters that were contemporaneous with Van Dine, such as Agatha Christie’s Arthur Hastings, were imbued with comparatively substantive personalities. Many readers could relate to Hastings as a likeable, if ultimately oblivious, witness to the story. By contrast, the Watson depicted in The Greene Murder Case and The Bishop Murder Case is a character that actively denies the reader any potential empathy.
The problem of interior personality in the case of narration has an essential meaning to the form of detective fiction. It is impossible to write a detective story that uses an objective third-person narrator that can travel freely between the interior minds of characters, even as this approach was commonplace in the history of modern novels. If the narration were to capture the inner lives of the criminal or detective, it would destroy the essential format of the detective novel. This is because a detective novel is carefully constructed around the convergence of layered narratives in its final resolution.
As a result, the author has no choice but to limit the narration to a particular person. Since the first-person narration of the criminal and detective would be impossible, a natural option is the first-person narration of someone else altogether—the Watson.
When considering the problem of perspective, the Watson as in the detective’s assistant is not literally essential. It would be possible to instead depict the story from the perspective of a character who happens to be caught up in the case as one of the many suspects. However, a distinct advantage of making the Watson a friend or associate of the detective is that they can be given access to information from the detective or investigators that would not be given to someone involved in the case as a possible suspect.
It goes without saying that the naming of the role of the Watson is derived from Doctor John Watson, the diegetic author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. In this respect, we can locate a notable rupture between the 19th and 20th century. This same form established by Arthur Conan Doyle was repeated, in form alone, by having the Watson, S. S. Van Dine, be the diegetic author of The Greene Murder Case and The Bishop Murder Case.
However, in this new context, the role of Watson appears as a faceless, soulless, and impersonal character that lacks any opinions—traits that accurately mirror the empty essence of the detective Philo Vance. This peculiar role of the Watson interrupts the conventional code that detective novels use to crack the problem of perspective.
In S. S. Van Dine’s work, there is no privileged interior self that attempts to speak through the work. As a result, the boundaries of the first-perspective perspective melt away into ambiguity and develop into a pseudo-third-person approach.
Naturally, this pseudo-third-person perspective is not afforded the objectivity and universality of the third-person typically seen in modern literature. In other words, the god-like perspective of Honoré de Balzac is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the world of modern literature, with its divisions between the first and third-person perspective, was transformed into something peculiar in S. S. Van Dine’s work.
