Corporate Detectives

My favorite detective writers are the ones who maintained a series for many years, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Rex Stout.

There are many reasons I prefer them to the American hard-boiled writers, including the quiet murders rather than the graphic violence and the respect for most of the characters rather than the gratuitous exploitation of women. There's also the expectation in the one that intelligence rather than action was critical to solving a mystery, and the assumption that, in the end, one could know the truth.

Now that I’m rereading the Christie novels I realized there is also a class difference between the writers I like and the ones I do not. I’m not talking about the obvious one between the upper class that inhabits the world of my favored writers and the mean streets of the other. Indeed, while Nero Wolfe indulges expensive tastes, both Hercule Poirot and Perry Mason are quite bourgeois.

Instead, Christie, Gardner and Stout create corporate detectives who depend on the specialization of function that enables mass production. Poirot is a retired policeman, Mason a lawyer, and Wolfe a professional inquiry agent. When each needs information, he hires someone, who in turn hires someone else to do the actual work. So, Poirot uses Mr. Goby who pays runners, Mason uses Paul Drake who runs a detective agency, and Wolfe uses Archie Goodwin who calls on Saul Panzer.

I’m not sure what it means that each of my favorites inhabits a three-tiered, capitalist world while the Americans do everything themselves. I would think my preference would be for the latter. Perhaps it’s just that I appreciate the first as products of a complex civilization they uphold in their pursuit of justice rather than the others who remain hunter-gatherers navigating a world without a social contract.