HUNTED DOWN: The Detective Stories of Charles Dickens
Edited by Peter Haining
Peter Owen, £9.95; 256pp

CHARLES DICKENS CAN justly be regarded as the founding father of the modern detective story, but his influence on the popularity of the genre and its development has been largely understated by critics of his work and of crime writing.

In this book Peter Haining does much to redress the balance, both in his admirable introduction and by his judicious selection from the novels and short stories. The book is, however, oddly arranged. It would have been more helpful if information about the genesis of each selection, including the date and circumstances of the original publication, preceded the extract rather than having to be sought in the introduction. A reader coming to Dickens for the first time, who begins the book with the piece entitled Nemesis, may be puzzled to find himself reading not a short story but a passage from Martin Chuzzlewit.

Dickens, like his friend Wilkie Collins, was fascinated by the seductively dangerous undergrowth of crime and in the work of the police, particularly the detective branch of Scotland Yard formed in 1842. He observed life in the section houses, accompanied detectives down the mean and violent streets of the metropolis, drew on real murders, both in his novels and in short stories, and portrayed in his fiction detectives whom he had met, creating from experience and imagination the most innovative, varied and vividly drawn police officers in English literature.

He frequently attended the London magistrates’ courts, was present at a number of murder trials and had a sufficiently strong stomach to view two public executions, including the hanging on November 13, 1849, of Frederick and Maria Manning. Haining tells us that on that occasion he hired a nearby roof so that his friends had an unrestricted view of the proceedings, and later the same day wrote a letter to The Times criticising what he described as “the indecent spectacle of public executions”.

Although Dickens’s first interest in the officers of the law was in The Pickwick Papers and a few mentions were made in his early newspaper reports, it was not until 1850 that he began writing the novels and short stories that have earned him his assured place in the history of crime writing. It is from those works that Haining has drawn his illustrations.

The first serious portrayal is Mr Nadgett, who appeared in the serialisation of Martin Chuzzlewit. Described as “a short, dried up, withered old man”, he is certainly far removed in appearance from later over-romanticised detective heroes. But the most memorable is surely Inspector Bucket in Bleak House who, despite his over-reverential respect for “Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet”, can move with confidence in all strata of society, including the criminal underworld, and is a persistent human bloodhound in tracking down the killer of the crafty lawyer Tulkinghorn.

“Studious in his observations of human nature, on the whole a benignant philosopher not disposed to be severe upon the follies of mankind, Mr Bucket pervades a vast number of houses and strolls about an infinity of streets, to outward appearances rather languishing for want of an object.” Inspector Bucket’s wife justifies her place as the first female amateur detective in fiction, adumbrating Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, as “a lady of a natural detective genius”.

Dickens was not above providing a little light relief by describing the inadequacies of the ordinary policeman whose plodding incompetence contrasts with the brilliance of the detective hero, a device that was to become fashionable, particularly in the inter-war years.

The short story that gives its name to the collection was inspired by a real-life murder case, that of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who in 1830 poisoned his sister-in-law for her insurance money. Dickens wrote the story for the New York Ledger and it was published in issues between August 20 and September 3, 1859. Haining claims that the tale has many admirers among modern crime novelists, but to me it reads more like a not wholly successful story by Conan Doyle. The account of an innocent young girl in the power of an obvious villain who has murdered her sister is narrated by a Mr Sampson, the chief manager of a life assurance company. Victorian writers were fond of stories about vulnerable young women in the power of villains but here, despite the cleverly evoked atmosphere of menace, too much is left unexplained, including the way in which the poison was administered.

Dickens’s finest work in the genre of the detective story was his last, the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood, published in 1870.

The story has continued to intrigue aficionados of detective fiction, who have propounded their different solutions with varying references to the incomplete text. One of the most interesting chapters in Hunted Down is a fascinating explanation of the mystery in an essay, The Edwin Drood Syndicate, by M. R. James, the ghost story writer, which appeared in two parts in The Cambridge Review during 1905 and which, Haining writes, has never been reprinted since. Had Dickens lived to complete it, The Mystery of Edwin Drood would probably have challenged the supremacy of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, described by T. S. Eliot as “the earliest, the longest and the best of modern detective stories”.

But even with his final novel left incomplete, this collection reaffirms that the influence of Charles Dickens on the development and achievements of detective fiction is unchallengeable.

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