One of the initial decisions that every author must make is whether to write in the first-person (I) or the third-person (he/she/they). To the reader this may seem like a technical matter with limited effect on the end product, but in the mystery story, the stakes are amplified; there is a crime to be solved, and having—or not having—access to the inner workings of the mind is of paramount importance to how the solution to the mystery is revealed.
The first-person narrator seems less popular in contemporary crime fiction as writers appear to prefer the freedom to move through time and space, from scene to scene, from character to character, and from mind to mind. But it wasn’t always this way: the Sherlock Holmes stories, the early Agatha Christie, and the Nero Wolfe novels all employ a first-person narrator. And in each case, it’s the plodding sidekick—Doctor Watson, Captain Hastings, and Archie Goodwin—who tells the story from the perspective of “I”. There is good reason for this: the reader needs to be kept a distance from the machinations of the mastermind detective’s inner thoughts. Imagine if the reader is permitted to know all that Holmes, Poirot, or Wolfe are thinking. The mystery would be solved quickly; the story would be over almost before it began. Justice would be served, but the reading experience would be short. How often is Watson forced to admit, “I confess that I was filled with curiosity, but I was aware that Holmes liked to make his disclosures at his own time and in his own way”? The good doctor is the filter between the reader and the detective, denying us access to Holmes’ omniscience.
Most of the earliest authors of the hardboiled school, who, in inventing their own style, wrote in reaction to the intellectual puzzles of the earlier mysteries, continued to write in the first-person: Hammett, with his nameless Continental Op, Chandler with Phillip Marlowe, and later, Ross MacDonald with Lew Archer. The new hardboiled detective wasn’t a genius, he was a man of action, tough and immediate. He wasn’t sitting in his armchair, smoking his pipe, thinking about whodunnit; he was knocking down doors not knocking on doors—and getting knocked down himself, if not knocked out. The detective in these early noir novels parallels the reader: the two locked together, united in purpose, chasing down the killer page by page; the detective’s discoveries are simultaneously made by the reader. There is no space between when the detective has a flash of understanding and the reader learns of it.
And it’s not just the immediacy: writing in the first-person is the most realistic of all narrative techniques. It is how we experience our world everyday: locked inside our heads, looking out at the mystery of life around us, unable to see into the black boxes of others’ psyches. In truth, the novel is the one artistic form that fully allows us into the mind of another, to know—if only on a fictional level—the voice, the thoughts and emotions, the dreams and loathings of another. (Film occasionally tries voice-over to get at this intimacy and fails miserably.) James M. Cain took it a step further and had some of his first-person narrators explain the very act of writing their stories. Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice: “So I’m in the death house now, writing the last of this so Father McConnell can look it over and show me the places where maybe it out to be fixed up a little, for punctuation and all that.” Even the copy-editing is made transparent!
And so when I write, I’m reaching for that same feeling—to be immediate and realistic, to show the world as we experience it, to propel the reader through the pages alongside the detective, to have them in his head sharing his discoveries, failures, and doubts in real time as if they were their very own.
Doctor John H. Watson is one of the great overshadowed characters of literature (for others, see Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Nausikaa in The Odyssey; there are many). Sherlock Holmes is not being ironic when, in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” he says, “I’m lost without my Boswell.” He would not only have been lost to current recognition and to posterity, but in his own self-absorption and ego. In this blog, however, I’m not writing about Holmes, but about his companion, who, in the story “Shiva’s Eye,” encounters mysteries long before he ever encountered his famous friend. Moreover, we must admit it’s because of Doctor Watson’s writing that his friend became famous.
Trace Evidence 