TAWNEE SPARLING*

Duke University

Rationalism and Romanticism in Detective Fiction

Detective fiction has consistently been one of the most popular literary
genres of the time since Poe revolutionized the idea in the 1800s. This
subset of crime fiction attends to the investigation of a crime by a
character acting in the role of detective, whether he or she is a
professional or an amateur. The crime in question is typically a murder
because, in addition to being the most thrilling and frightening crime of
all, it is an archaic and fundamental aspect of every society, a destroying
force that is present everywhere and across all time boundaries. Most
importantly of all, though, murder is highly variable. There exists an
infinite number of motives, methods, punishments, and emotions
associated with the simple act of taking another‟s life. Consequently, the
genre of detective fiction can establish and follow a definitive formula that
readers never tire of due to the unlimited takes and variations an author
can spin for the purpose of originality.
The formula of a standard detective story consists of an investigator
unlocking the connections among crime scenes, witnesses, victims,
motives, and modi operandi into a single coherent scheme that guides him
to suspects and ultimately to a perpetrator. In addition, detective fiction
involves a uniquely retrospective aspect in which the story of investigation
occurs in the present tense as the rising action in contrast to the story of
the crime, in which the conclusive findings of the detective take us back
to the past. Because of the variation that murder (or crime in general)
permits, many authors have taken their works to extremes, where their
novels waver on the edge of the genre. But despite the fact that literature
is a creative outlet, the genre of detective fiction still must be held to
specific regulations and adherences to the formula. Therefore, in order for
a literary work to truly follow the framework of a detective story and be
included unquestionably into the genre of detective fiction, it must
separate rationalism from romanticism and focus primarily on the former.
Rationalism can be defined as the use of reason as a source of knowledge
and justification. It is a logical theory of mind in which events and
statements appeal to the philosophy and science of making inferences.
Romanticism, on the other hand, is the literary incorporation of
imagination, intuition, speculation, and at times the idea of a supernatural.

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E-Mail: tawnee.sparling@duke.edu
202 andererseits Vol. 2

According to Charles Rzepka in his book, Detective Fiction, romanticism

encourages “emotional expression, the exercise of the imagination,
spontaneity, and the placing of love before duty.”1 These two ideals must
be separated in order for a plot to be accepted by readers as worthy of
inclusion into the category of detective fiction.
In her Oxford speech entitled “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,”
Dorothy Sayers, the renowned English crime writer, stresses the fact that
detective fiction is ultimately based on the fact that we live in a rational
universe. This goes hand in hand with the premise that detective fiction is
meant to bring order from disorder, to rescind the chaos created by crime.
Aristotle‟s ideas that “[t]he first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of
the detective story is the plot, and the characters come second,”2 and
“[t]he story should never be made up of improbable incidents”3 lead
Sayers to conclude that “the impossible-probable is better than the
improbable-possible.”4 Basically, the detective story must have accuracy
(or the deception of accuracy) of scientific detail in order for readers to
believe the narrative. The aficionados of detective fiction might be those
intrigued by popular culture, yet they are still an extremely intelligent
crowd. In order to keep them amused, the author must create a logical
labyrinth of clues and twists that entangles their intellect and reasoning.
Sayers suggests that we look to Aristotle‟s idea of paralogismos in order to
do so. A paralogism, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a
piece of false or erroneous reasoning, especially one which the reasoner is
unconscious of or believes to be logical.”5 Paralogisms are false syllogisms
that deceivingly lead the reader into willingly accepting a falsehood as the
truth. Sayers explains it as seducing the reader into “telling the lie for
himself.”6 Without the employment of logic and rationalism, the readers
would have no incentive for picking up on what the author desires them
to assume. Just by buying a detective novel at their local bookstore,
readers are already demonstrating their belief that the world is based on
rationales and their desire to follow a character that uses this same belief
to restore order to a society or world upset by a crime.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‟s Sherlock Holmes series and Agatha
Christie‟s Hercule Poirot novels are prime examples of detective fiction
that utilize rationalism as the foundation of their stories. And it can be no

1 Charles J. Rzepka, Detective Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 46.

2 Dorothy Sayers, “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” English 1, no. 1 (1936): 23-35,
26.
3 Ibid., 28.
4 Ibid.,
5 Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “Paralogism.”
6 Sayers, “Aristotle,” 31.
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coincidence that Conan Doyle produced fifty-six short stories and four
novels with Holmes as the eccentric mastermind and Christie‟s Poirot
appeared in thirty-three novels. More significantly, the fame of these
characters has proven to be transcendent through time. The Hercule
Poirot stories have been translated into over fifty-six languages and made
into fourteen movies, while the Sherlock Holmes series has been adapted
into over 200 films and just as many or more adaptive works such as
graphic novels, books, screenplays, etc. The popularity of these two
characters and the recordings of their investigations is no doubt a result of
the authors‟ meticulous attention to detail and logic.
In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” Holmes himself states, “I shall
take nothing for granted until I have the opportunity of looking
personally into it.”7 His method is founded on the observation of “trifles”
and he never overlooks even the most minute of details. Through
scientific methods, observations, and linguistic analyses, Holmes is able to
solve any mystery presented to him with the smallest amount of physical
effort on his part. Upon visiting the murder scene across from the
Boscombe Pond, he determines that ash on the scene is the remnant of an
Indian cigar that was rolled in Rotterdam. After evaluating the
impressions in the damp grass, he also is able to conclude the physique of
the murderer to be one with a left sided limp. In every Holmes mystery,
the reader, along with Watson, is left in the dark as to Holmes‟ line of
deduction until the conclusion when Holmes provides a comprehensive
explanation of his reasoning. Conan Doyle is only able to string his
readers on in this manner because they trust that Holmes is using
scientific reasoning and secretly wish that they were capable of the same
analytical capabilities.
Agatha Christie developed Hercule Poirot as the same type of
detective. His philosophy of reality is depicted in Murder on the Orient
Express when he pronounces, “The impossible cannot have happened,
therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.”8
Throughout each story, he works to rationalize the irrational. He never
accepts anything other than concrete facts or data and therefore, his
readers, similar to those of Holmes‟, devotedly follow and trust his logic.
Conan Doyle and Christie owe much of their success to their
validation of Holmes‟ and Poirot‟s inferences with scientific verifications
that appear true enough for an intelligent reader to accept. For example,

7 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” in Adventures of

Sherlock Holmes (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892): 76-103, 77.
8 Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, (New York: Black Dog &

Leventhal Publishers, 2006), 164.

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in Murder on the Orient Express, Poirot reconstructs a burnt letter using two
mesh hat forms and a candle. The readers cannot know for certain if this
process would actually be successful, but it seems like a legitimate
scientific procedure. Similarly, when Sherlock Holmes determines the
specific brand of cigar that left ash on the scene in “The Boscombe Valley
Mystery,” he explains his conclusion by stating that he was able to deduce
the fact because he has painstakingly conducted chemical analyses on over
140 varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco. It is highly unlikely that
any reader of this story will just so happen to be a specialist in tobacco,
yet most readers with scientific knowledge will find it highly credible that
if one were to elaborately and chemically examine tobacco, one would be
able to match the tobacco to the specific manufacturer. In other words,
Conan Doyle and Christie successfully incorporate “impossible-
probables” into their plots rather than “improbable-possibles,” as Sayers
would say. Not one of their stories contains any speculation, “gut-
intuitions” on the part of the main detectives, or any feature that cannot
be given a scientific or worldly explanation. Furthermore, each of the
detective novels by these two popular authors fits the detective formula to
a tee. Readers know in advance what they are in for (and yet continue to
read all of both series). They anticipate the fact that they will encounter a
story, in which either Holmes or Poirot is called to a case, follows clues,
conducts interviews, determines suspects, and ultimately reveals the
culprit at the end of the narrative by taking the reader back in time to the
episode of the crime.
On the other hand, the presence of romanticism in a detective story
disrupts this formula and the ensuing comfort of the reader. The inclusion
of the supernatural, the mythical, or the transcendental into detective
fiction diminishes any possible trace of realism and diametrically opposes
any use of logic in the story. This is by no means to say that fiction
including traces of romanticism is of a lower grade than those novels that
are founded on rationalism or that they are or should be less popular. In
fact, Patrick Süskind‟s Perfume, a horror fantasy romanticized by magical
realism, has been translated into thirty-five different languages and was
only available in hardback edition for its first ten market years, both
strong testaments to its extreme popularity and literary worth.
G. K. Chesterton, an English writer who dabbled in fantasy and
crime fiction, evaluates detective fiction as being artistic writing and a
form of romanticism in his 1902 essay “A Defence of Detective Stories.”
He claims that detective fiction is literature in which some sense of the
poetry of modern life is expressed. In his opinion, detective fiction treats
the city and modernity as natural, beautiful phenomena. He declares,
2011 SPARLING: Rationalism and Romanticism in Detective Fiction 205

“[C]ivilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most

romantic of rebellions,”9 and sees social justice as a poetic figure and
morality as a dark and daring conspiracy. This view of the mystical
evocation of reality as prominent in detective fiction is an idealistic
interpretation that would work if an author were capable of keeping it in
the distant background and only lightly touching upon it through imagery
or other stylistic devices. However, most detective fiction that does
incorporate principles of romanticisms treats them as primary themes that
clash with any possibility of a true detective recipe. Works such as Poe‟s
“The Man of the Crowd,” Schiller‟s “The Criminal of Lost Honor,” and
Süskind‟s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer are examples of stories that,
because of their quixotic focus on imagination, psychology, and individual
identity, can at most fall into the very broad genre of crime fiction and
never be specified into detective fiction.
Edgar Allan Poe‟s short story “The Man of the Crowd” features a
perceptive man in a London coffee house who speculates about the lives
of passers-by in the nearby street. He identifies “Jew pedlars, with hawk
eyes flashing,”10 “beggars scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp,”11
“feeble and ghastly invalids,”12 and many other individuals at a sweeping
glance. “The wild effects of the light enchained [him] to an examination
of individual faces”13 and he is ultimately driven by the illogical and
obsessive desire to follow a decrepit old man for days through the
avenues. At first glance, this central character may appear to be a sort of
detective, but his inferences have absolutely no substantiation other than
the highly superficial use of physiognomy. His speculation and his
neuroticism deem him an irrational character. The story contains no
crime, only the sneaking suspicion of evil, and is therefore a work of
personal identity and frenzied psychosis rather than anything dealing with
actual detection.
The romanticist idea of assessing a person‟s character based on
appearance and beauty is a fairytale notion that cannot be taken as serious
justification of good or evil. Christian Wolf, Friedrich Schiller‟s murderer
by negative circumstances in “The Criminal of Lost Honor,” is described
as “so unattractive that [his appearance] caused all women to shrink back

9 G.K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Detective Stories,” in The Defendant (London:

R. Brimley Johnson, 1902): 118-123, 122.
10 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” in Tales (London: Wiley and

Putnam, 1845): 219-228, 222.

11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 223.
206 andererseits Vol. 2

from him.”14 And in Süskind‟s Perfume, Grenouille is a diminutive,

pockmarked, little frog of a man. Both of these characters are supposed to
immediately be judged by the reader on the simple basis of their
appearance, a stark deviation from detective fiction in which an objective
perspective is required for judgment.
This use of appearance to provoke emotions about a character is
commonly used in literature, including rationalist detective fiction. For
example, in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” young Miss Turner is
described by Watson as “one of the most lovely young women that I have
ever seen in my life,”15 which translates to the immediate assumption of
her innocence by readers. The important difference in cases such as this
and cases such as Grenouille and Wolf is that Miss Turner is a minor
character and no physical evidence ever points to her as a suspect. She can
be incorporated into the story as a beautiful, pure character in order to
drive the secondary love story of the plot. Grenouille and Wolf are main
characters and their atrocious acts are depicted as directly related to their
ugliness. They are ugly and are therefore destined to be evil, or they are
evil and are therefore destined to be ugly. The question of relation
between these two traits transforms both stories into analyses or studies
of human nature. Crimes and murders are committed, so both fall into the
genre of crime fiction; however, because the psychological aspect of their
crimes is of more importance to the authors, both stories cannot follow
the classic detective formula. In fact, both deviate from the standard in
the same manner. They each assert the fate of both villains within the
introduction and treat the narratives as historical accounts meant to teach
a moral lesson of some sort: that our virtue relies upon our external
situation and that one‟s identity and spirit are defined by the presence (or
lack of) such virtue.
Furthermore, the story of Grenouille would fit into the genre of
fantasy fiction, which contrasts too sharply with detective fiction.
According to American fiction author Susann Cokal, Perfume should be
classified as a horror story as well as a “philosophical meditation on
expression and perception.”16 The novel‟s premise is that Grenouille has

14 Friedrich Schiller, “The Criminal of Lost Honor: A True Story,” trans. Jeffrey
L. High, in Schiller’s Literary Prose Works: New Translations and Critical Essays, ed.
Jeffrey L. High (Rochester: Camden House, 2008): 39-55, 39.
15 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” in Adventures of Sherlock

Holmes (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892): 76-103, 89.

16 Susann Cokal, “ „Hot with Rapture and Cold with Fear‟: Grotesque, Sublime,

and Postmodern Transformations in Patrick Süskind‟s Perfume,” in The Philosophy

of Horror, ed. Thomas Fahy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010): 179-
198, 180.
2011 SPARLING: Rationalism and Romanticism in Detective Fiction 207

the most efficient olfactory sense in the world and can concoct a magical
perfume that smells so beautiful as to control anyone subjected to it. He
can smell across walls and cities, and even has the power to abstract
smells of the human body. There is no point of bringing a detective
character into the mix because there is no way one would be able to
restore order from the disorder created by Grenouille. If Süskind were to
incorporate a detective character into the novel, he or she would not be
able to follow science or rationality in order to catch Grenouille because it
would be illogical to conclude that his motive is the creation of a human
based perfume, since it is an impossible feat without the help of magical
qualities. The character of Richis exemplifies this in his inability and
failure to understand the situation despite developing suspicions.
In other words, a romanticist detective novel would have to
persuade its readers into believing the improbable-impossible, an
impracticable task. An example at an attempt at this type of intermingling
of rationalism and romanticism is Edgar Allan Poe‟s “The Murders in the
Rue Morgue.” Dupin, the highly intelligent amateur detective of the story,
is characterized by his highly deductive analytical capabilities; however, he
is also defined by his imagination and ability to speculate. He reasons
conclusions from hard data, such as his discovery that the murderer came
in through the window because of the broken latch. But he also accepts
hypotheses without testing them, such as when he assumes the
Frenchman is a sailor, and puts himself in the mindset of other
individuals, such as when he goes through the entire thought process of
this hypothetical French sailor, something Holmes would never
undertake. In addition, the story itself contains a perfect example of an
improbable-possible. The fact that an orangutan committed the crime was
an impractical structuring on Poe‟s part. It is a highly unlikely scenario
that no reader is able to pick up on or potentially follow the trail of
Dupin‟s conclusions.
The mixture created by Poe limits the extent to which Dupin‟s
rationality can be accepted and takes away from the detective plot, since
for all the readers know, Dupin could just be making really good
assumptions throughout and because it seems unlikely that he would be
able to deduce such an improbable circumstance. Despite its tendency to
confuse due to its unrealistic properties, Poe‟s “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue” was accepted by the literary community and is now considered
the world‟s first detective story.17

17Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New

York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 171.
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The glimpse of pure rationalism exuded by Dupin must have been

the driving force that caused authors throughout the centuries to take
Poe‟s basis and apply it to their own characters and novels, such as
Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Father Brown, and many others. This
refinement and the ensuing establishment of the genre of detective fiction
that would popularly last throughout the centuries could only have been a
direct result of the separation of rationalism and romanticism to their
appropriate spheres and the subsequent differentiation of detective fiction
from fantastical crime fiction.