On Detective Novels

It is now some years since Miss Carolyn Wells, the American lady who has produced many of our most charming stories of murder and mystification, wrote to a magazine to complain of the unsatisfactory sort of review accorded to that sort of book; but not yet has the abuse been corrected. She said it is only too obvious that the task of reviewing detective stories is given to people who do not like detective stories. She says, and I think not unreasonably, that this is very unreasonable: a book of poems is not sent to a man who hates poetry; an ordinary novel is not reviewed by a rigid moralist who regards all novels as immoral. If mystery stories have any right to be reviewed at all, they have a right to be reviewed by the sort of person who understands why they were written. And the lady proceeds to say that, by this neglect, the nature of the technique really required in such a tale is never adequately discussed. I, for one, agree with her that it is a matter well worthy of discussion. There is no better reading, and in the true sense no more serious reading, than the few critical passages which great critics have devoted to this literary question; such as Edgar Allan Poe's disquisition on analysis at the beginning of the beautiful idyll about the murderous ape 5 or the studies of Andrew Lang on the problem of Edwin Droodj or the remarks of Stevenson on the police novel at the end of The Wrecker, Any such discussion, clearly conducted, will soon show that the rules of art are as much involved in this artistic form as in any other 3 and it is not any objection to such a form that people can enjoy it who cannot criticize it. The same is true of any good song or any sound romance. By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece. It is as if one were to say that because a clever man may have an impediment in his speech, therefore a man cannot be clever unless he stammers. For all unpopularity is a sort of obscurity 3 and all obscurity is a defect of expression like a stammer. Anyhow, I am in this matter on the popular side 5 I am interested in all sorts of sensational fiction, good, bad and indifferent, and would willingly discuss it with a much less capable exponent of it than the author of Vkky Van, And if anyone likes to say that my tastes are vulgar and inartistic and illiterate, I can only say I am quite content to be as vulgar as Poe and as inartistic and illiterate as Andrew Lang.

Now, it is all the more curious that the technique of such tales is not discussed, because they are exactly the sort in which technique is nearly the whole of the trick. It is all the more odd that such writers have no critical guidance, because it is one of the few forms of art in which they could to some extent be guided. And it is all the more strange that nobody discusses the rules, because it is one of the rare cases in which some rules could be laid down. The very fact that the work is not of the highest order of creation makes it possible to treat it as a question of construction. But while people are willing to teach poets imagination, they seem to think it hopeless to help plotters in a matter of mere ingenuity. There are text-books instructing people in the manufacture of sonnets, as if the visions of bare ruined quires where late sweet birds sang, or of the ground-whirl of the perished leaves of hope, the wind of death's imperishable wing, were things to be explained like a conjuring trick. We have monographs expounding the art of the Short Story, as if the dripping horror of the House of Usher or the sunny irony of the Treasure of Franchard were recipes out of a cookery book. But in the case of the only kind of story to which the strict laws of logic are in some sense applicable, nobody seems to bother to apply them, or even to ask whether in this or in that case they are applied. Nobody writes the simple book which I expect every day to see on the bookstalls, called How to Write a Detective Story,

I myself have got no further than discovering how not to write one. But even from my own failures I have gained stray glimpses of what such a scheme of warnings might be. Of one preliminary principle I am pretty certain. The whole point of a sensational story is that the secret should be simple. The whole story exists for the moment of surprise 5 and it should be a moment. It should not be something that it takes twenty minutes to explain, and twenty-four hours to learn by heart, for fear of forgetting it. The best way of testing it is to make an imaginative picture in the mind of some such dramatic moment. Imagine a dark garden at twilight, and a terrible voice crying out in the distance, and coming nearer and nearer along the serpentine garden paths until the words become dreadfully distinct j a cry coming from some sinister yet familiar figure in the story, a stranger or a servant from whom we subconsciously expect some such rending revelation. Now, it is clear that the cry which breaks from him must be something short and simple in itself, as, "The butler is his father," or "The Archdeacon is Bloody Bill," or "The Emperor has cut his throat," or what not. But too many otherwise ingenious romancers seem to think it their duty to discover what is the most complicated and improbable series of events that could be combined to produce a certain result. The result may be logical, but it is not sensational. The servant cannot rend the silence of the twilight garden by shrieking aloud: "The throat of the Emperor was cut under the following circumstances: his Imperial Majesty was attempting to shave himself and went to sleep in the middle of it, fatigued with the cares of state 3 the Archdeacon was attempting at first in a Christian spirit to complete the shaving operation on the sleeping monarch, when he was suddenly tempted to a murderous act by the memory of the Disestablishment Bill, but repented after making a mere scratch and flung the razor on the floor 3 the faithful butler, hearing the commotion, rushed in and snatched up the weapon, but in the confusion of the moment cut the Emperor's throat instead of the Archdeacon's 3 so everything is satisfactory, and the young man and the girl can leave off suspecting each other of assassination and get married." Now, this explanation, however reasonable and complete, is not one that can be conveniently uttered as an exclamation or can sound suddenly in the twilight garden like the trump of doom. Anyone who will try the experiment of crying aloud the above paragraph in his own twilight garden will realize the difliculty here referred to. It is exactly one of those little technical experiments, illustrated with diagrams, with which our little text-book would abound.

Another truth to which our little text-book would at least tentatively incline is that the roman foUcier should be on the model of the short story rather than the novel. There are splendid exceptions: The Moonstone and one or two Gaboriaus are great works in this style j as are, in our own time, Mr. Bentley's Trent* s Last Case^ and Mr. Milne's Red House Mystery, But I think that the difficulties of a long detective novel are real difficulties, though very clever men can by various expedients get over them. The chief difficulty is that the detective story is, after all, a drama of masks and not of faces. It depends on men's false characters rather than their real characters. The author cannot tell us until the last chapter any of the most interesting things about the most interesting people. It is a masquerade ball in which everybody is disguised as somebody else, and there is no true personal interest until the clock strikes twelve. That is, as I have said, we cannot really get at the psychology and philosophy, the morals and the religion, of the thing until we have read the last chapter. Therefore, I think it is best of all when the first chapter is also the last chapter. The length of a short story is about the legitimate length for this particular drama of the mere misunderstanding of fact. When all is said and done, there have never been better detective stories than the old series of Sherlock Holmes j and though the name of that magnificent magician has been spread over the whole world, and is perhaps the one great popular legend made in the modern world, I do not think that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has ever been thanked enough for them. As one of many millions, I offer my own mite of homage.

There are two modern malcontents who are very often confused together. There is the man who grumbles because the poor are educated and the man who grumbles because they are not. A doubt about education is identified with a denial of education, in the sense of a refusal or repudiation of it in the abstract j a thing that does exist, but exists in a totally different type of man. He is, in my opinion, a highly offensive and foolish sort of man. Years ago he used to go about bursting with indignation because somebody wanted poor children taught the piano. Why they should not be taught the letter F on the piano as much as in the spelling-book I never could understand. But we might lawfully conduct an inquiry into exactly how much good is actually done by their learning either one or the other. Suppose that literally the only result of teaching a child the piano were that he went on hammering one note with one finger for hours at a time, not only without any notion of a tune, but without any notion that one note is supposed to follow another. We should not complain of his having learnt to play, but of his not having learnt to play. We should recognize that a piano is in itself an ingenious and harmonious structure, but we should still think that a piano without a piano-player was something of a white elephant j and none the less for having, like any other white elephant, a magnificent display of ivory. Now that sort of result, in relation to the piano, would be something like the ultimate result in relation to the spelling-book. A spelling-book is not really intended to teach people to spell, but rather ultimately to read, and even to write. That is, we do not want to dwell on one word, any more than one note 3 we want people to string words together in a sequence like notes in a tune. And we want them ultimately to string sentences together, not exactly as they are in a sentence in an exercise, but as they ought to be in a serious sequence of ideas. As we want a person to play for pleasure, we want him to think for pleasure. And it is hard to believe that anyone can go on tapping one note or repeating one catchword for pleasure.

What is the matter with the curious cultural atmosphere around us is that it abounds, not in trains of thought, but in tags of language. Vast numbers know that a certain phrase should be used about a certain subject 3 but it never occurs to them even to wonder how it would apply to some other subject. There is such and such a set piece of argument against Pianos for the People, and such and such a set piece for Pianos for the People 3 or whatever the question may be. But it is rare to find any individual, on any side, guilty of the intellectual restlessness of asking himself whether the argument about Pianos for the People would also apply to Pianolas for the People, or wherein lies the difference of principle between pianos and bagpipes and guitars. To ask what an argument depends onj to consider where it leads 5 to speculate on whether there are other cases to which it applies j all this seems to be an unknown world to many who use the words of the debate glibly enough. The point is that they only use those words in connexion with that debate. They deal in formulas like those provided by the old debating club text-books; with A Hundred Points For and Against Home Rule.

Here is a phrase, for instance, which I heard the other day from a very agreeable and intelligent person, and which we have all heard hundreds of times from hundreds of such persons. A young mother remarked to me, "I don't want to teach my child any religion. I don't want to influence him; I want him to choose for himself when he grows up." That is a very ordinary example of a current argument; which is frequently repeated and yet never really applied. Of course the mother was always influencing the child. Of course the mother might just as well have said, "I hope he will choose his own friends when he grows up; so I won't introduce