In the last years of the nineteenth century, the prototype of the modern string quartet ensemble emerged: democratic, virtuosic, well rehearsed and no longer tied to one locality but willing to travel in search of work. It was necessary to embrace the work ethic because concert fees had to be split four ways: a front-rank violinist such as Adolf Busch would receive as much for playing one concerto as his entire quartet would earn for playing the equivalent of three concertos in an evening. Summer festivals were virtually unknown in 1900 and artists lived for the whole year on what they could make in the winter season. Only a fortunate few ensembles had wealthy sponsors; hence the members of many quartets supported themselves partly by teaching or by orchestral playing – and it was common for the string principals of an orchestra to appear as a quartet, whether they matched well or not.

The almost obsessive perfectionism that would mark twentieth-century ensembles was still unknown; but before long, it was beginning to take shape in response to the demands of the new music. As with most developments in the history of string playing, technical progress was patchy and sporadic. However, two countries in particular, Bohemia and Hungary, consistently led the way in advancing standards. The emergence of the gramophone record, the proliferation of chamber music societies and the ease of modern transport, which made touring by professional quartets a viable proposition, all played their parts in these developments; and the two World Wars acted as watersheds for the introduction of new generations of ensembles. By midway through the century, festivals were beginning to spring up all over the world in the summer months; and the idea of having a resident quartet in an educational institution was catching on.

String quartet performance might at first seem an unpromising area for the practice of historical awareness. After all, there is no mystery about the instruments required and the musical texts are so explicit that there can be little room for radical re-interpretation. Yet the huge amount of music written in the first seventy or so years of the string quartet's existence was played on instruments substantially different from their modernised twentieth-century successors. The Classical repertory from Haydn to Schubert and the even more numerous contributions from their lesser contemporaries were written for instruments and bows whose construction reflected their historical position midway between the late Baroque and the early nineteenth century. And although the opportunities to decorate or alter the notes on the page became increasingly rare as the eighteenth century progressed, the manner in which these notes were played was also far removed from conventional twentieth-century practice.

The early quartets

An indication of the historical and stylistic location of the early quartets of the mid eighteenth century is given by the fact that several of their composers also produced collections of trio sonatas, a Baroque form then on its last legs. The variety in this early quartet repertory is reflected in its range of titles, from ‘quartetto’ to ‘cassatio’. The content of these works ranged from straight fugues through simple sonata forms to light divertimento movements. Two sets stand out. One of the earliest references to a quartet party is in the autobiography of Dittersdorf, where he recalls tackling ‘six new quartets by Richter’.

Although the first full-time professional string quartet ensemble did not emerge until 1892, the nineteenth century saw a steady improvement in the standard of quartet playing. Several trends can be seen running through the century as a whole: a gradual strengthening of the actual sound emitted by the players; the emergence of Beethoven as the recognised king of quartet composers; and the espousal of the heritage or museum-style concert in which music of a previous age was presented. The last two of these developments were largely precipitated by Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), whose giant personality cast its shadow over the second half of the century.

The sound of the quartet

It is possible to make an informed guess at the kind of sonority produced by a typical string quartet ensemble at the start of the century. With rare exceptions, quartets were played in large rooms rather than halls, and there was no need to strive for a powerful sound. The tone of even the top violin soloists was not large. Bows had reached their evolutionary peak but most instruments still had their original shorter necks and the fingerboards ran more parallel with the bodies, so that the gut strings were under relatively light pressure.

Full-time violists were unknown, although the Stamitz brothers both played the instrument to a high standard, and the viola in a quartet would invariably be played by a violinist who would adapt violin technique to a smallish instrument and would therefore make a quite narrow, nasal sound. The cello had no endpin and the cellist held it resting on his lower legs, partially muffling the tone. Although there is not complete agreement on how much vibrato was generally applied, it is likely that, especially in quartet music, the effect was used sparingly, like an ornament, and never in chordal passages. We therefore have in our mind’s ear a quite small, delicate, ‘straight’ sonority which various twentieth- and twenty-first-century period-instrument groups have striven to reproduce, with varying success.

Few of the world's top string players perform in public now a days on instruments made by contemporary luthiers. Most opt instead for antique instruments, especially examples by Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737), Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù (1698–1744) or other Italian master luthiers, which they are either sufficiently wealthy to own or fortunate to have on extended loan. This is no recent trend. Rightly or wrongly, it has long been believed that the sound potential of most violins will mature with age and playing.

There is naturally good reason for the esteem in which both Stradivari and Guarneri have been held, even though during their lifetime the tonal qualities of the highly arched models of the Amati family and the Austrian Jacob Stainer (?1617–83) generally held favour. The instruments developed by Stradivari, Guarneri and their contemporaries began to reign supreme only after they, in company with most other extant instruments of the violin family, had been subjected to various external and internal modifications towards the end of the eighteenth century, to make them more responsive to changes in musical style and taste. These modifications occurred between c. 1760 and c. 1830 as a response to the demand for greater tonal sonority, volume and projection, resulting from the increasing vogue for public concerts discussed in Chapter 1. Developments in bow construction at about the same time led to the standardisation (c. 1785) of bow design, measurements, weights and materials by François Tourte (1747–1835).

The golden age of crime fiction is usually taken as the period between the two world wars, though some start it earlier, with the publication of E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case in 1913, and the first critic to use the term dated it from 1918 to 1930, followed by 'the Moderns'; major texts in 'golden age' style were also produced after 1940, both by new writers and by figures from the earlier period. The term 'golden age' has been criticised as being unduly homogenous and seen as inappropriately 'replete with romantic associations': in fact the types of crime fiction produced in this period were far from uniform - the psychothriller and the procedural began, there was a wide range of practice in the mystery and the stories do regularly represent types of social and personal unease which would contradict a notion of an idyllic 'golden' period.

However, while recognising variety in the period, as well as the relative uncertainty of its borders, it is still possible to identify a coherent set of practices which were shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by most of the writers then at work. Elements that were randomly present in earlier crime fiction suddenly become a norm, like multiple suspects, and some earlier tendencies largely disappear, notably the use of coincidence and historical explanations. A genre of crime fiction, best named for its central mechanism as the clue-puzzle and epitomised by Agatha Christie and ‘S. S. Van Dine’, clearly forms a recognisable entity by the mid-1920s.

The Newgate novel and the sensation novel were sub-genres of the literature of crime, which enjoyed a relatively brief but quite extraordinary popular success in the 1830s and 1840s and the 1860s respectively. The Newgate novel was associated exclusively with male authors. The sensation novelists, on the other hand, included a number of best-selling female authors, and this fact made for important differences of emphasis in the two sub-genres, and also for significant differences in the critical response to them. Both generated debates whose terms extended beyond the literary, and which overlapped in interesting ways. Thus, as well as being entertaining and often absorbing narratives in their own right, these novels and the controversies they engendered tell us a great deal about cultural anxieties and social and literary change at two key points in the Victorian period. Newgate novels enjoyed enormous popularity and some notoriety in the early 1830s, and generated great debate and controversy in the late 1830s and the 1840s.

Given that it contains a potent and provocative pun, 'private eye' is as good a title as any for a chapter on the emergence of a home-grown, American sub-genre of crime fiction. The obvious alternative, 'hardboiled', is appropriately folksy in its reference to a tough-minded behavioural code but covers more territory and is less resonant. In association with 'private', the eye/I(nvestigator) in question already conjures up some of the defining characteristics of what was to become a popular heroic type in the American grain. A private eye suggests among other things: a solitary eye, and the (forbidden) pleasures associated with Freud's scopic drive; a non-organisation man's eye, like the frontier scout's or the cowboy's; an eye that trusts no other; an eye that's licensed to look; and even, by extrapolation, an eye for hire. To propose further that private eye also connotes those specifically American concepts of 'orneriness' and 'libertarianism' is a stretch, but to anyone familiar with the fictional type, the connection is soon apparent.

When the thriller writer Robert Ludlum died in March 2001, several of his obituarists tellingly recalled the reaction of a Washington Post reviewer to one of the author's many, phenomenally popular novels: 'It's a lousy book. So I stayed up until 3am to finish it.' This anecdotal, tongue-in-cheek confession neatly captures the ambivalence associated with a hugely successful mode of crime writing, a guilty sense that its lack of literary merit has always somehow been inseparable from the compulsiveness with which its narrative pleasures are greedily gobbled up, relegating the thriller to the most undeserving of genres. To describe a thriller as 'deeply satisfying and sophisticated' (to pluck a blurb at random from the bookshelves) is already to beg the insidious question: how satisfying and sophisticated can it be?

Until quite recently, the words 'Cambridge Companion' and 'Crime Fiction' would have seemed mutually exclusive. Crime fiction was certainly written about, but on the assumption that readers and author were already dedicated fans, happy to ponder together the exact chronology of Sherlock Holmes's life-story or the mystery of Dr Watson's Christian name. Where the authors claimed some academic credentials, their love for the genre was owned up to as a guilty pleasure - W. H. Auden called it 'an addiction like tobacco or alcohol' - or juxtaposed to the world of 'proper' culture with tongue a fair way into cheek, as in Dorothy L. Sayers's demonstration that when writing the Poetics, what Aristotle desired 'in his heart of hearts . . . was a good detective story'.

Since the 1960s, however, the presumed barriers between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature have been progressively dismantled. If only – at first – as indicators of a great many readers’ needs and anxieties, crime texts were increasingly seen as worthy of close analysis, and by now there are thousands of carefully argued, well-researched, elegantly written studies of the crime genre available and awaiting further comment. Like any new development this emergence has a specific history, any given intersection of which is likely to reveal different terminologies as well as different critical preoccupations. Up to the early 1980s, study of the form was still focused mainly on ‘detective’ or ‘mystery’ fiction, and nodded back to the half-serious ‘rules’ which had been drawn up for the genre in the inter-war period and stressed the figure of the detective and the author’s fair handling of clues. This tradition is well discussed in Stephen Knight’s chapter on ‘the Golden Age’ in the present book.

Until quite recently, the story of the development of crime fiction was most commonly told as a movement from man to man, beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, then Arthur Conan Doyle, followed by Dashiell Hammett and so on. Fittingly enough, critics of the genre most concerned with mysteries, secrets, and deceit thus misrepresented its true story by writing women, both writers and detectives, out of its history until they appeared, seemingly from nowhere, first in the Golden Age and then again with the rise of feminist crime fiction in the 1980s. That distorted and partial history began to undergo revision in the late 1980s, as feminist critics discovered lost women writers such as Seeley Register and Anna Katherine Green and also began to look at gothic and sensation fiction for the roots of the genre. It is now widely acknowledged that the woman writer and the woman detective have as long a history in crime fiction as do their male counterparts.

When Julian Symons published his classic study Bloody Murder in 1972, his forecast of a 'declining market' for straightforward detective fiction seemed reasonable. The once pre-eminent formula of crime, false trails and triumphant solution by a brilliant detective either looked very old-fashioned or had started to be replaced by other sources of interest, such as espionage or psychological suspense. At the time of writing, 2002, things look different. Detection is once more flourishing and, without sacrificing its traditional complement of early-discovered corpses, red herrings and surprise solutions, now enjoys a critical esteem in the 'respectable' marketplace that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Books have also at least doubled in length: from the 200-odd pages which remained statutory up to the 1970s, many detective novels now weigh in at around 500.

The literature of the eighteenth century is suffused with crime, but handles it in a wholly different way from that of the nineteenth and twentieth. Looking back across those centuries, it is easy to trace this difference to the penal realities of the time: the absence of any reliable system of policing, or of the detection of criminals on any routine basis. Furthermore, there seems to have been little ideological belief that this could or indeed needed to be done effectively. What system there was was largely privatised: the 'prosecution' of theft was the responsibility of the injured party, who might offer a reward for information or hire an agent. This situation fed straight into the hands of gangsters such as the notorious Jonathan Wild, who arranged in turn for the robberies, the receipt of the reward for returning the goods and, when it suited him, the arrest of the supposed thieves - usually members of his own gang - in his self-proclaimed role of 'Thieftaker General'. Alternatively, the authorities relied on members of the public to detect crime as it happened and summon the watch - parochially-based and with few autonomous powers beyond responding to calls for arrest.

It is not for nothing that Moriarty was otherwise known as the Napoleon of crime, that Poe's Chevalier Dupin invented ratiocination from a comfortable armchair in a darkened room in Paris, or, for that matter, that Sherlock Holmes takes such pains to scoff at the French police, notably a certain detective named Lecoq, who, he claims, 'was a miserable bungler'. French contributions to the development of crime fiction, in particular the detective story, are significant in the sense that one cannot conceive of the developments in nineteenth-century English detective fiction without them. Holmes's arrogance towards the continental police, notably the French, nevertheless bespeaks a certain amount of insecurity with regard to the fearsome reputation of the French police established during Fouchè's reign of terror under Napoleon, a reputation further consolidated throughout the nineteenth century.

The spy story is a close but distinct variation on the tale of detection with the difference that there is no discrete crime involved but rather a covert action which, as John Cawelti and Bruce Rosenberg argue, transgresses conventional, moral, or legal boundaries. The action is self-evidently political since it involves national rivalries and constantly veers towards a paranoid vision of 'violation by outside agencies' and 'violation of individual autonomy by internal agencies'. A further distinction from the detection genre is that the investigator is often himself an agent and therefore, unlike Todorov's ideally detached detective, is implicated in the very processes he is investigating. And since the genre is defined by its international subject, the novels can only be partly explained through formalist analyses like that of Bruce Merry. Espionage fiction became popular in two periods - the turn of the century and the 1960s - when popular anxieties were growing over the credibility of government processes. Its narratives therefore manifest what Michael Denning calls ‘cover stories’ where the surface action screens a complex play of ideology. Initially spying contrasted unfavourably with an ethic of open courage. Reviewing Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden in 1928, D. H. Lawrence declared: ‘Spying is a dirty business, and Secret Service altogether is a world of under-dogs, a world in which the meanest passions are given play’. However, by 1966 this distaste had become replaced by a perception of centrality. A character in Kingsley Amis’s The Anti-Death League (1966) can plausibly claim that the spy is a ‘uniquely characteristic and significant figure of our time’. The history of spy fiction is one of a gradual shift from the margins to the sixties when espionage novels flooded the market and serious critical attention began to be paid to the genre. Even Jacques Barzun, in the course of a lofty and largely negative meditation on spy fiction, admits that ‘the soul of the spy is somehow the model of our own; his actions and his trappings fulfil our unsatisfied desires’.