＜＜Murder for Pleasure:
The Life And Times Of The Detective Story＞＞
By Howard Haycraft
Published in 1941 by D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc.
世界公认的一部著名侦探推理评论史，着重于英美两国，即使出版在六十年前，如今依然有着很大的影响力，绝对是任何一位推理迷不可错过的收藏。尽管我很怀疑这本书在国内会否有出版社愿意翻译成中文版，根据我在台湾推理论坛得到的消息，台湾在评论史方面的书也是屈指可数，很大的原因归纳于推理小说还不算主流兴旺，这类名著翻译的人都少，更不要说有本土人专门研究，如此下来导致著名的评论史多出于推理文化浓重的国家，如果国内能做到这一步的那天，一定是推理文化的一大跃进。
这部书有四百多页，很可惜我一时不可能也没有那么多时间全部扫描，放上一段前言和一幅世界上最早的侦探小说手稿：爱伦坡的《莫格街凶案》让大家观摩一下。
手稿图案：http://www.geocities.com/le_yang/firstdet.jpg
全书目录：
01. Time: 1841--Place: America (Genesis)
02. The In-Between Years (Development)
03. Profile By Gaslight (Renaissance)
04. England: 1890-1914 (The Romantic Era)
05. America: 1890-1914 (The Romantic Era)
06. The Continental Detective Story
07. England: 1918-1930 (The Golden Age)
08. America: 1918-1930 (The Golden Age)
09. England: 1930- (The Moderns)
10. America: 1930- (The Moderns)
11. The Rules Of The Game (A Reader Looks at Writers)
12. The Murder Market
13. Friends And Foes (The Critical Literature)
14. A Detective Story Bookshelf
15. Dictators, Democrats, And Detectives
16. The Future Of The Detective Story
17. A Comprehensive Detective Story Quiz
18. Who's Who In Detection
Appendix A: "The Purloined Letter" Controversy
Appendix B: Sherlock Holmes' Name and Other Addenda
Index
作者前言：
The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.
PHILIP GuEDALLA
My theory is that people who don't like mystery stories are
anarchists.
REX STOUT
WHEN Nazi Luftwaffe squadrons unleashed their wanton fury on
London in the late summer of 1940, initiating to their own
consternation a deathless epic of human courage and resistance,
they also drove a city of eight million souls beneath the earth's
surface for nightly refuge. After the first shock of a kind of
battle new in the annals of warfare had passed, life underground
began to take on some of the aspects of normality. One of the
earliest harbingers of rehabilitation was the appearance of books
in the fetid burrows while the bombs rained overhead. What
volumes, asked curious Americans from the comfortable security of
their homes, could men and women choose for their companionship
at such a time? The answer was soon forthcoming in dispatches
from the beleaguered capital, telling of newly formed "raid"
libraries set up in response to popular demand to lend detective
stories and nothing else. The implications contained in this
circumstance, as applied to the underlying appeal of the
detective novel, might easily constitute a superior essay in
themelves (and are perhaps unfathomable at that). But surely no
more striking illustration could be found of the vital position
which this form of literature has come to occupy in modern
civilized existence, for whatever reasons.
That detective stories are a mere hundred years old seems, in
fact, beyond belief; in the same sense that imagining daily life
without the telephone or the radio strains all credulity. For
today it is a matter of sober statistical record that one out of
every four new works of fiction published in the English language
belongs to this category, while the devotion the form has managed
to arouse in millions of men and women in all walks of life, the
humble and the eminent, has become a latter-day legend.
No less a qualified authority than Mr. Somerset Maugham has
recently ascribed this state of affairs to the fact that "the
serious novel of to-day is regrettably namby-pamby." The charge
is outside the province of the present volume and can not be
examined here. But Mr. Maugham goes on, at least half seriously,
to predict the day when the police novel will be studied in the
colleges, when aspirants for doctoral degrees will shuttle the
oceans and haunt the world's great libraries to conduct personal
research expeditions into the lives and sources of the masters of
the art.
Whatever the merits or likelihood of these suggestions, the
surprising circumstance is that no adequate factual or analytical
history of this movement so clearly the outstanding literary
phenomenon of modern times-yet exists. There have been, of
course, the excellent but brief critical studies by Dorothy
Sayers, Willard Huntington Wright, and E. M. Wrong; and the
longer but relatively inaccessible (and, it must be said, rather
academic) treatises of H. Douglas Thomson, Regis Messac, and
Francois Fosca, the first published only in England and now out
of print, and the latter two available only in French. These,
together with a handful of prefaces, and a larger but widely
scattered and uncoordinated body of magazine articles, and one or
two "how-to-write-it" manuals, constitute the entire published
literature on one of the most vigorous and virile types of all
contemporary writing. A form which, to many readers, has come to
occupy the solacing spot which Robinson Crusoe held in Gabriel
Betteredge's affections: a "friend in need in all the necessities
of this mortal life"-the one dependable and unfailing anodyne in
a world so realistically murderous that fictive murder becomes
refuge and retreat! ... The present book has been undertaken in
the hope of at least partially remedying this deficiency: of
providing a reasonably readable and useful outline of the main
progress of the detective story from Edgar Allan Poe to the
present moment.
Throughout the book, the reader will find, emphasis has been
placed on the actual and factual rather than the theoretical
phases of the subject; with side excursions, when space has
permitted, into those fascinating if trivial problems of
idiosyncrasy and mannerism so dear to the heart of the true
enthusiast. In short, the underlying object of the work has been
pleasure-for reader and writer alike.
In making any such book, the problem of exclusion must be,
necessarily, more difficult than that of inclusion. The question
of just what constitutes a detective story will be considered at
some length in the body of the work. or the present we can do no
better than repeat again John Carter's useful and often quoted
dictum, as the basis upon which authors and their various works
were accepted or rejected: "If we decide, as surely we must, that
a detective story within the meaning of the act must be mainly
occupied with detection and must contain a proper detective
(whether amateur or professional), it is clear that mystery
stories, crime stories, spy stories, even Secret Service stories,
will have to be excluded unless any particular example can show
some authentic detective strain."*
Thus, the volume in hand has been restricted to the bona-fide,
the "pure," detective story and its craftsmen -as distinguished
(to quote Carter again) from "mere mystery on the one hand, and
criminology on the other." Regrettably, it has been impossible to
discuss at length all the competent authors who come legitimately
under even this rule. Their number has become so increasingly
great within recent decades that only a veritable encyclopedia
could deal with them adequately. Too, this volume is of necessity
concerned less with literary merit per se than with setting forth
the history and evolution of detective fiction as a recognizable
form. This has made the basis of choice chiefly historical rather
than appreciative. Hence, detailed discussion has been limited to
those practitioners whose works, in the writer's opinion, have
most significantly influenced the progress of the police romance
throughout the years, either in technique or in popularity.. The
premise has sometimes meant the inclusion of authors of no very
great distinction in themselves, and the omission of others
(including many personal favorites) whose achievements, judged by
purely literary standards, might be considered of a higher order.
Nevertheless, the attempt has been made to recognize if only in
the several lists and indexes most of the authors who have
contributed ably and consistently to the form.
In addition to these general premises, a few personal bservations
may, perhaps, be permitted. It has not been my wish in
undertaking this work to set myself up in any sense as
an "authority" on the subject of the detective story. Naturally,
I own to a strong bias in favor of the police novel among the
several forms of recreational and pleasure literature--else I
should not have attempted this labor of devotion at all. But I
have tried to approach the subject in the spirit of the average
friendly reader, and, so far as possible, to synthesize and
express that hypothetical individual's opinions and reactions,
likes and dislikes, rather than those of professional or formal
criticism. If I have succeeded in doing this in any degree, I
shall perforce be satisfied.
I should not be honest, however, if I did not confess to certain
preferences and antipathies which other readersmay or may not
share. Some of these predilections and aversions are admittedly
of little save personal importance, and have been treated
accordingly. But, while I have tried to be fair at all times, I
have not spared the horses when discussing any tendencies which
seem to me really dangerous to the future welfare of my favorite
form of reading and that of several million equally fortunate
individuals. On the opposite side, I have conscietiously
attempted to avoid over-solemnity about the subject, but have
endeavored at all times to consider it only for what it is--a
frankly non-serious, entertainment form of literature which,
nevertheless, possesses its own rules and standards, its good and
bad examples, and at its best has won the right to respectful
consideration on its own merits. (But I venture to believe that
the demonstrable relationship between the detective story and
democratic institutions, discussed in one of the chapters, is not
without some serious implication in the present day.)
Acknowledgment is hereby gladly, if of necessity anonymously,
expressed to a long list of individuals and cooperations who have
assisted invaluably by one means or another in the preparation of
this book: the personal friends who have listened so patiently
and contributed so many helpful suggestions, and the friendly and
equally helpful correspondents among authors, editors, and
publishers; more specifically, to the magazines in which some of
the material has appeared prior to book publication, including
the Saturday Review of Literature, the London Spectator, American
Cavalcade, and the Wilson Library Bulletin. Special gratitude is
also owing to Neal and John Townley of the Beekman Place
Bookshop, New York, and to Robert M. and Sarah St. John Trent,
without whose combined assistance the "Who's Who in Detection' at
the end of the volume could not have been compiled.
In the field of illustration I am happy to acknowledge the
cooperation of President Parke R. Kolbe, Dean Mari Hamilton Law,
and the Board of Trustees of the Drexe Institute of Technology;
Henry B. Van Hoesen, Librarian, and the Library Committee of
Brown University; Vincent Starrett and The Macmillan Company, H.
T. Webster, Mrs. May Lamberton Becker, and th New York Herald
Tribune; The H. W. Wilson Company; Mrs. Winona McBride berholtzer
and the Estate of Dr. E. P. Oberholtzer; Ned Guymon; Charles
Honce; P. M. Stone; Mrs. May Futrelle; the publicity and
editorial departments of several publishers, and a number F: of
the individual authors; and, particularly in the case of writers
of a past day, the departments and limitless resources of the New
York Public Library. In picturing the older authors,
incidentally, it has been my whim to show them whenever possible
at the prime of their careers rather than in the sunset years of
life. The whole matter 'of illustration has, of course, been
governed by the twin considerations of availability and
limitation of space.
In conclusion, it is perhaps unnecessary to say that every effort
has been made to achieve completeness and accuracy within the
bounds laid down. But it is inescapable that in any work
exploring a comparatively uncharted field and involving so much
detail, some errors and omissions at least will have occurred. (A
larger number of these have been avoided than would otherwise
have been possible, by the discerning eye of Earle F. Walbridge,
who has so invaluably assisted in reading proof.) Some of the
interpretations, too, while made with every intention of
objective fairness, may be open to question. I shall welcome
correspondence from interested readers on any such points, for
correction or modification in possible future editions.
H. H.
Old Mastic,
Moriches, New York
*J. Carter (editor), New Paths in Book-Collecting (London, Co
stable, 1934).
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