The rise and fall of detective stories
Detective stories became hugely popular in the 19th and 20th centuries. William D. Rubinstein looks at why social changes eventually led to their downfall.
The detective story is normally said to have begun in the fertile brain of the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), especially in his stories featuring the detective C. Auguste Dupin. From 1859, Dupin had a counterpart in Monsieur Lecoq, created by the French author Emile Gaboriau. Despite these American and French origins, it was to Britain that detective fiction migrated, where it too root and flourished, becoming a characteristically British genre.
This transition occurred because of one author and his great detective. The most famous of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, was introduced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in A Study in Scarlet, first published in 1887, and later became the subject of four novels and 56 short stories. Nearly all of the Holmes stories are narrated by his friend Dr Watson. Watson is constantly amazed and stupefied by Holmes' genius, but despite years of working with him, Watson is never able to produce these brilliant insights himself. Holmes is memorably eccentric, with a range of endearing and less endearing habits. He is a brilliant private detective, categorically better than the plodding and mediocre officials of Scotland Yard, who constantly turn to him when they are baffled. This in itself is pure fiction: in real life there were never any brilliant private detectives to whom Scotland Yard turned when they failed, and the Yard's Criminal Investigation Department (CID) had a remarkable clear-up rate and was highly competent.
Most of the Holmes stories are set among the higher levels of 19th-century British society, a world inhabited by professional men, retired army officers and country gentlemen, as well as members of royalty and cabinet ministers. Few take place among the working classes or the very poor, whereas in fact much crime was a product of the poverty and gangs in London's underworld.
In the 20th century, detective stories became increasingly popular. Reading these stories was one of the characteristic aspects of the British middle classes in the 'golden age' of British detective fiction—the 1920s and 30s. Their emphasis on Rationality, the inevitable triumph of justice, and the existence of an unofficial super-detective tells us much about the society of the time. So, too, do the stock characters and unstated prejudices in these works: country folk and domestic servants were almost always depicted as unintelligent, and women were often depicted in a simplistic, two-dimensional way, although a few female detective writers would present female characters in a more realistic manner.
Most of the well-known British authors of 'golden age' detective stories were drawn from the middle classes, like their audience. Conan Doyle was a doctor who turned to writing fiction while he awaited his patient; Freeman Wills Crofts was a railway engineer in Northern Ireland; Gilberts Keith Chesterton and Anthony Berkeley were journalists; Cecil Street a career army officer. Apart from a few superstars such as Agatha Christie, financial rewards for these interwar authors were rather meagre; a few hundred pounds per book—a useful income, but nothing princely.
US writers such as Rex Stout and Ellery Queen attempted to recreate the 'golden age' of British detective fiction. For the most part their books were mere imitations of the British models, although they were seldom wholly successful. But in the 1920s and 1930s, America also saw the rise of the 'hard-boiled' genre and its detective type: the tough private cop who appeared in the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Apart from the violence that appeared throughout their works, Hammett's and Chandler's novels were often marked by a political agenda that sought to expose the inequality at the heart of American life. Britain had no real parallel either to their outlook on the world or (until much later) to their violence but upheld the belief that the authorities should punish criminals regardless of their circumstances.
By around 1960, the classic British detective story was in serious decline. It seemed that writers had simply run out of ingenious plots and puzzles for their detectives to solve. The best-known crime fiction writers, such as P.D. James, eschewed private detectives for police inspectors, and straightforward puzzles for stories that were full of unexpected twists.
Today the detective story no longer exists in Britain, at least in its old form. Arguably this mirrors the transformation of that society as a whole. The belief that scientific developments were invariably beneficial possibly reached its height during the period when the classic detective story flourished, as did the belief in putting rationality at the heart of Britain's education system. And finally, the central belief that evil-doers would inevitably get their just deserts through the incorruptibility of the judicial system was replaced by a questioning of some of the procedures and decisions associated with that system.
The plan to bring an asteroid to Earth
Moving in orbit around our sun are millions of rocks known as asteroids. Now scientists have plans to capture one.
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Send a robot into space, catch an asteroid and bring it back to Earth's orbit. This motivated scientists and engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). A four-day workshop was dedicated to investigating the feasibility of capturing a near-Earth asteroid, bringing it closer to our planet and using it as a base for future manned spaceflight missions.
This is not something the scientists are imagining could be done some day off in the future. It is possible with the technology we have today and could be accomplished within a decade. A robotic probe could anchor to an asteroid with simple magnets or grab it with specialized claws. Alternatively, a large spacecraft could use its gravitational field to shift the orbit of a larger asteroid, sending it towards Earth.
'Once you get over the initial reaction - You want to do what?! - it actually starts to seem like a reasonable idea,' says engineer John Brophy, who helped organize the workshop. In fact, many of these ideas have been on the drawing board for years as part of the NASA planetary defense program against large space-based objects that might threaten Earth. And there's no shortage of potential targets. NASA estimates there are 19,500 asteroids at least 100 meters wide within 45 million kilometers of Earth.
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Though rearranging the heavens may seem an excessive undertaking, the US mission has its merits. The US already has plans to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid, a mission that would mean confining them in a tiny capsule for three to six months and involve all the risks of a deep-space voyage. Instead, robots could bring an asteroid close enough for them to get there in just a month.
An asteroid would provide a stationary base from which to launch missions further into space. There are several advantages to this. For one, launching missions carrying materials from Earth requires a lot of power, fuel, and consequently money, because of our planet's strong force of gravity. Since this would be far weaker on an asteroid, materials mined there could be more easily taken off the asteroid and shuttled around the solar system.
And many asteroids have a lot to offer. Some are full of metals, which can be mined and used to build space-based habitats or brought back to Earth. Others are up to one-quarter water, which would either be used for life-support or broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to make fuel. And astronomers would have the chance to get a close-up look at one of the solar system's earliest relics, generating important scientific data. 'Executing the asteroid retrieval plan would help demonstrate and greatly expand mankind's space-based engineering capabilities,' says engineer Louis Friedman, another co-organizer of the Caltech workshop. For instance, the mission would teach engineers how to capture an uncooperative target, which could be useful practice for planetary defense missions in the event of a threat from a meteoroid or comet from space approaching our planet,' he adds.
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Former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, cofounder of the B612 Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid strikes, points out that though it would be technically feasible, shifting such a hefty and substantial target would not be easy: "You're moving the largest mother lode imaginable," he says.
Engineers would need to be absolutely certain they could control such a potentially dangerous object. "It's the opposite of planetary defense; if you do something wrong, you have a Tunguska event," says engineer Marco Tantardini from the Planetary Society, referring to the powerful 1908 explosion above a remote Russian region thought to have been caused by a meteoroid or comet.
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Still, these obstacles only add to the appeal of the project for engineers, who love to go over every potential difficulty in order to solve it. And if the challenges for a large asteroid seem too daunting, researchers could always start with a smaller asteroid perhaps 2 to 10 meters across. Last year, Brophy helped conduct a study to look at the feasibility of bringing a two-meter, 1,000-kilogram asteroid - of which there might conceivably be millions - to the International Space Station. The study suggested the asteroid could be captured robotically in something as simple as a large bag. Of course, such a small object might not have the same emotional impact as a larger target. 'NASA isn't going to want to go to something that is smaller than our spaceships,' says engineer Dan Mazanek from NASA Langley Research Center.
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No matter the size of the asteroid, these plans would require hefty investments. Even capturing a small asteroid would consume at least a billion dollars. Convincing taxpayers to foot such a bill could be difficult. However, private industry might be interested in getting involved. One possibility would be to push the asteroid to near-Earth orbit and then invite anyone who wants to develop the capabilities to reach and mine the object.
However, though the undertaking might be scientifically exciting, and provide great insight into the solar system formation, this is not enough on its own to justify the expense of bringing an asteroid to Earth. Investigations of asteroids can be done much more cheaply with an unmanned spacecraft, says chemist Joseph A. Nuth from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. According to Brophy, ultimately, we would be working towards bringing an asteroid closer to Earth in order to help move out into the solar system.
The science of sleep
Emma Bailey explores the curious world of deep (or NREM) sleep and light (or REM) sleep
Sleep is not an optional activity and is more essential to our survival than food. By the time they die, most people will have spent more than 25 years asleep. As Paul Martin, author of Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams, puts it: When you die, a bigger slice of your existence will have passed in this state than in raising children, playing games, listening to music, or any other activity that humanity values highly. Why is it necessary to spend quite so long in this unconscious state? Unlike breathing or eating, the biological benefits of sleep are not immediately obvious.
It is a behaviour that can be found remarkably far back down the evolutionary ladder. In all creatures, sleep generally involves a cessation of physical activity and reduction of sensory awareness for regular periods. Like us, other animals are kept awake by stimulants such as caffeine and sleep more as babies.
Sleep is therefore a mainstay of animal existence and has been honed by millions of years of evolution. Yet until 1952, scientists assumed it was a passive state in which brain activity ceased. But then an extraordinary discovery was made. Sleep research pioneer Nathaniel Kleitman, of the University of Chicago, noticed it was marked by periods of rapid eye movement, now known as REM sleep, and that REM sleep was accompanied by a frenzy of brain activity akin to that seen during periods of consciousness.
We now know that brain activity is far from uniform while we sleep. Over a 60-minute period it goes through four distinct stages of NON-REM (NREM) sleep, and one episode of REM sleep. It has been discovered that most dreaming occurs during REM sleep, and that deep sleep occurs during the NREM stages. In fact, the two types of sleep are as different as sleeping is from wakefulness. Interestingly, while all mammals, birds and more recent reptiles have both types of sleep, primitive reptiles experience just NREM sleep. This implies that REM sleep evolved more recently, possibly around the time of the reptilian ancestors of all mammals, 250 million years ago.
For centuries it was assumed that sleep served simply as a mechanism for allowing the body to recuperate. Recently, it has been shown that NREM sleep does indeed increase after vigorous exercise. However, people who lie in bed all day also enter NREM sleep, so it can't only be due to this. Jerome M Siegel of the University of California believes that NREM sleep provides an opportunity to repair the body cells damaged during wakefulness. As he explains, 'The decrease both in metabolic rate and in brain temperature occurring during NREM sleep seems to provide an opportunity to repair this damage.'
However, Professor Jim Horne of the University of Loughborough disagrees: There is little evidence that any organ apart from the brain goes through repair during sleep. All the evidence shows that these other organs recover just as well during restful wakefulness. The brain, Horne points out, never shuts down during wakefulness. Even if we are resting, it remains in a state of readiness. Scans have shown that it is only during NREM sleep that the brain gets any rest. Recognising that when NREM sleep evolved millions of years ago, animals didn't have highly developed brains, he concludes, "The functions of NREM sleep have probably changed with evolution, maybe beginning as an energy conserver, and culminating, in humans, as a facilitator for the recovery of high-level brain function."
While NREM most probably involves rest and recovery, REM sleep and dreams is a much more contentious area of research. According to Dr Claudio, deprived of REM sleep, memory consolidation is compromised. We need it to reprocess what has happened during the previous period of wakefulness in order to store information that is useful.'
Certainly, there are studies that suggest a strong link between REM sleep and memory. After being taught a new skill, people exhibit a rise in REM sleep. If they are deprived of REM sleep, they are less able to remember the skill. Experiments have shown that REM sleep must occur within 24 hours of an experience if it is to be remembered.
There are other views about the function of REM sleep. The pioneering sleep researcher Michel Jouvet believes that the intense activity seen in the brain during REM sleep is essential to neuronal development before birth. There is little to activate the developing brain during the long, dark months in the uterus, so Jouvet hypothesises that the brain generates its own stimuli in the form of REM sleep and dreams to aid its own development.
In short, the function of REM sleep and dreaming is still something of a mystery. The hope is that, as scanning techniques become more refined, the brain regions underlying the two types of sleep will be better understood. However, we're not likely to get a straightforward answer, As Horne says: 'Already over 100 neurochemicals and brain regions connected with sleep have been found, and more and more are being discovered. So clearly there's no single sleep centre.' One thing is certain, we'll never be without sleep. It's highly improbable that any new drug could enable us to avoid it and remain healthy for any length of time.