Alleyn As A Gentleman Detective
The gentleman detective has long been a staple of British crime fiction, particularly in novels from the Golden Age.
One obvious comparison with Roderick Alleyn is the fictional Lord Peter Wimsey. Alleyn's family background resembles the relationships created by Dorothy Sayers for her fictional Lord Peter Wimsey (born 1890). Like Alleyn, Wimsey has a titled older brother, who however is far more grand—he's a duke. Like Alleyn, Lord Peter's brother is less intelligent and more conventional than his more famous younger sibling. Alleyn's mother, Lady Alleyn, closely resembles in manner the Dowager Duchess of Denver, Wimsey's mother. Both ladies are affable and intelligent, and strongly support (and perhaps prefer) their younger sons. One marked difference between the fictional biographies of Alleyn and Wimsey, who are about the same age, is in their military service during World War I. Alleyn's army service is glossed over and never discussed, whereas Wimsey's distinguished service on the Western Front has mentally scarred him for life.
Like Alleyn, at least two of Agatha Christie's detectives clearly belong in the gentry. Her elderly spinster, Miss Marple, is not from the aristocracy but is quite at home amongst them, while the diminutive Mr. Satterthwaite (in The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930) and Three Act Tragedy (1934)) has a similar background and is wealthy besides. Her most famous detective character, Hercule Poirot, is a foreigner, and is thus outside the English class system (of which Poirot takes advantage).
Two later and widely known gentleman detectives may also be compared to Alleyn. These are Adam Dalgliesh, created by P. D. James, and Inspector Morse, created by Colin Dexter. Like Alleyn, Dalgliesh flourishes in the Metropolitan Police despite being definitely gentry, but is a recluse and a poet. However, Morse works in Oxford and is (or was) upwardly mobile: he apparently won a scholarship to Oxford but subsequently failed. Like Alleyn and Wimsey, Morse served in the British army before joining the police.
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Famous quotes containing the words gentleman and/or detective:
“My gentleman gives the law where he is; he will outpray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good company for pirates, and good with academicians; so that it is useless to fortify yourself against him; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I could as easily exclude myself, as him.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practiced by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)