CRIME STORIES

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 232, 23 May 1932, Page 8

CRIME STORIES

TOO MANY CORPSES MR. J. B. PRIESTLEY AND THE DETECTIVE NOVEL. "DIFFICULT TO SURPRISE." ' Are you getting bored with current detective fiction? Mr. J. B. Priestl-ay, the author of "The Good Companions" confesses he is, but instead of setting it aside he suggests remaking it. What he would like is a few less corpses and a few more interesting crimes, usually ignored. And he pays a tribute to this form of entertainment, since "it furnishes one of the chic pastimes of the public, and by no xneans the more foolish public either. Writing in the Evening Standard, he first deals with his grievances: — "So many detective stories have been turned out during these last few years that on readipg a new one, even one by writers as eompetent as Mr. Will Grofts and Mr. Forsythe, most of us feel that we have read it all before. We are too well acquainted with the bluff that ends with the niost unlikely person as the criminal, and even with the double bluff that returns to fix ^tbe guilt on the most likely person. "It is terribly difficult to surprise us now, Moreover, we still have our various private objections. I, for one, object to the numbe rof smail objects that guilty people leave behind them. Why should a button always fall off -.unnoticed just there? And why are there always so many people not asleep in their beds on that fatal night of the 14th ? Haven't you noticed that. Not Only Crime. "Let a murder be staged at a country house in most of these stories. and you find that the host and 75 per cent. of his guests have all been prowling round on that particular night. It won't do. And if we are to have epigrams and back chat and comic relief, then ii suggest that murder is left out. As it is, far too many detective stories begin with a corpse. "Murder is not the only crime. Perhaps the best all-round detective story ever written, 'The Moonstone,' was about a theft. I would like to see a few detective stories written round people's disappearances. "Or if you want a light-hearted detective tale, why not invent .a few light-hearted themes? If you are reading for sensations, then probably you must have murder. But if you are reading chiefly to match your wits against those of the author and to admire his ingenuity, then it is not even necessary to have a crime at all. "Miss Dorothy Sayers and experts make a distinction between the sensational crime novel, such as those of Wallace, and the 'intellectual' crime novel, which the reader approaches as a sort of puzzle. In the latter kind the ordinary qualities of a writer of fiction are supposed hardly to matter at all. This I doubt. I doubt, too, if many people can really read any kind of tale and rnerely see it as a puzzle. "That is why I suggest that an attempt be made to push the intelligent detective tale a little nearer the ordinary novel of character and manners This would be particularly useful now that it is becoming increasingly difficult to provide us with a really good new detective puzzle. Solid Backgrouna. "Some of tbe Americans, it seems to me, are good at this mixed kind, the detective-cum-ordinary novel, notably two women — Kay Strahan and Frances Noyes Hart, and Ellery Queen. (Not that monument of irritating pretentiousness, S. S. Van Dine.)" Such a new form, Mr. Priestley thinks, will need 'a rather more solid background." Then "characters that are a little less like lay figures. Then again—though this is probably only my own private taste — rather more move- • ment, for I must confess I like the detective story writer who moves me about a bit, follows a clue to Aberdeen or Marseilles, and does not hang about the library and shrubbery for ever. "The detective tale is one of the popular literary forms of this age, just as the bloodthirsty five-act tragedy was one of the popular literary forms of the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare popped up to turn one of those crude bloodthirsty five-act pieces into Hamlet. "Will anybody do something like that with the detective tale? Is anybody even trying? Can it be done? "It is one of the weaknesses of this age that nearly all our more sensitive and intelligent writers are completely divorced from popular forms of literature. It is not so much that they are neglected because they are too sensitive, too intelligent, for the general reading public as that they are neglected because they do not write the kind of thing that public likes. If you think that necessarily proves them to be great writers I leave you to 'explain away Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fielding, Goethe, Dic1 kens and other men of talent in their day who had some success with the ^public of their day, using popular forms.