WHO CARES WHO KILLED HIM?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 325, 14 September 1945, Page 7

WHO CARES WHO KILLED HIM?

Leading Critic Attacks Detective Fiction

ERE is heresy. The reviewH ers are attacking detective fiction. One of our readers has sent us a copy of the New Yorker, in which Edmund Wilson, one of the best critics in America, and many think in the English-speak-ing world, opens a_ broadside on Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and even on Ngaio Marsh. Others have questioned the place of such writers in literature. Wilson calls’ them dull and unreadable. We quote some of his most sweeping comments. But for the reinforcement of the faithful we quote first from the Times Literary Supplement. Here is a paragraph from a recent Leading Article: A dozen new detective stories are noticed in this week’s Literary Supplement, Almost every copy of every title is now circulating like a loving-cup down a line of readers stretching from here to Burma. These readers are facetiously called "addicts," as if their craving for this type of book were somehow morbid; as if it were unnatural for man’s moral and intellectual faculties to fasten upon images of retributive justice working solely through the human agency of Logic, and pursuing, with no help fyom the pagan Eumenides, criminals who are quite sure they have got away with murder. If anyone doubts that a good detective story represents the resistance to everything that culminated in Hitler, let him hold the book up against its temporal background. In a world that gauges the importance of events by the size of their headlines, the Great Detective ponders over the burnt match, the lost bootlace, the tiny and apparently negligible thing that may have power to hang a man. In a world in which popular education consists of biting off more ideas than can be chewed, the detective story remains the one form of fiction that absolutely defies the professional "digester"; it can

be read or it can be left unread, but it cannot be read about. Again, there is need in these days of industrial specialisation for books that take the layman through the mysteries and jargons of other men’s trades and professions. A whole large subdivision of detective fiction serves that social purpose. If the man in the street knows anything of the intricacies of advertising, bookselling, campanology and a hundred other.walks of life, it is because Death too has walked their mazes, with sharpeyed investigators on his hcels. To the social historian such books will have fifty times the documentary value of the crude _ fifteenth-century Dances of Death. On the Other Hand .°. . Comment of that kind Mr. Wilson calls plain bunk. Here is his account of a recent experience:

Three months ago I wrote an article on some recent detective stories. I had not read any fiction of this kind since the days of Sherlock Holmes, and since I constantly heard animated discussions of the merits of the mystery writers, I was curious to see what it was like today. The specimens I read I found disappointing, and I made some rather derogatory remarks on my impression of the genre in general. To my surprise, this brought me letters of protest in a volume and of a passionate earnestness which had hardly been elicited even by my occasional criticisms of the Soviet Union. Of the thirty-nine letters that have reached me, only seven approve my strictures. The writers of almost all the others seem deeply offended and shocked, and they all say almost exactly the same thing: that I had simply not read the right novels and that I would surely’ have a different opinion if I would only try this or that author recommended by the correspondent. Overwhelmed by so much insistence, I at last wrote my correspondents that I would try to correct any injustice by undertaking to read some of the authors

e that had received the most recommendations and taking the whole matter up again. The preferences of these readers, however, when I had a tabulation of them made, turned out to be extremely divergent. They ranged over fifty-two writers and sixty-seven books, most of which got only one or two votes each. The only writers who got as many as five or over were Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes, Raymond Chandler, and the author who writes under the names of Carter Dickson and John Dickson Carr. : It Didn’t Ring the Bell The writer that my correspondents were most nearly unanimous in putting at the top was Miss Dorothy L. Sayers. who was pressed upon me by eighteen people, and the book of hers that eight of them were sure I could not fail to enjoy was a story called "The Nine Tailors." Well, I set out to read "The

Nine Tailors" in the hope of tasting some novel excitement, and I must confess that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever eee in any field. The first part of it is a about bell-ringing’ as it is practised in English churches and contains a lot of information of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopedia article on campanology. I skipped a good deal of this, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English village characters: "Oh, here’s Hinkins with the aspidistras. People may say what they like about aspidistras, but they do go on all the year round and make a background," etc. There was also a dreadful conventional English nobleman of the casual and debonair kind, with the embarrassing name of Lord Peter Wimsey, and, though he was the focal character in the novel, being Miss Dorothy Sayers’ version of the inevitable Sherlock Holmes detective, I had to skip a good deal of him too. In the meantime, I was losing the story, which had not got a firm grip on my attention, but I went back and picked it up and steadfastly pushed through to the end, and there I discovered that the whole point was that if a man was shut up in a belfry while a heavy peal of chimes was being rung, the vibrations of the bells might kill him. Not a bad idea for a murder, and Conan Doyle would have known how to dramatise it in an entertaining tale of thirty pages, but Miss Sayers had not hesitated to pad it out to a book of three hundred and thirty, contriving one of those stock cock-and-bull stories about a woman who commits bigamy without knowing it and larding the whole thing with details of church architecture, bits of quaint lore from books about bellringing, and the awful whimsical patter of Lord Peter. Sub-Literary I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well, and I felt that my correspondents had been playing her as their literary ace. But, really, she does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary" than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-litera level. In any serious department of fiction, her writing would (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) not appear to have any _ distinction at all. Yet, commonplace in this respect though she is, she gives an impression of brilliant talent if we put her beside Miss Ngaio Marsh, whose "Overture to Death" was also. suggested by several correspondents. Mr. De Voto has put himself on record as believing that Miss Marsh as well as Miss Sayers and Miss Margery Allingham writes her novels in "excellent prose" and _ this throws for me a good deal of light on Mr. De Voto’s opinions as a critic. I hadn’t quite realised before, in spite of his own rather messy style, that he was totally insensitive to writing. It would be impossible, I should think, for anyone with the faintest feeling for words to describe the unappetising sawdust which Miss Marsh has poured into her pages as "excellent prose,’ or as prose at all except in the sense that distinguishes prose from verse. And here egain the book is mostly padding. There is the notion that you could commit a murder by rigging up a gun in a piano, ‘so that the victim will shoot himself when he presses down the pedal, but this is embedded in the dialogue and doings of a lot of faked-up English county people who are even more tedious than those of "The Nine Tailors." How Can You Care? The enthusiastic reader of detective stories will indignantly object at this point that I am reading for the wrong things; that I ought not to be expecting good writing, characterisation, human interest, or even atmosphere. He is right, of course, though I was not fully aware of it till I attempted "Flowers for the

Judge," considered by connoisseurs one of the best books of one of the masters of this school, Miss Margery Allingham. I looked forward to this novel especially because it was read by a member of my family, an expert of immense experience, and reported upon very favourably, before I had got it to myself. But when I did, I found it completely unreadable. The story and the writing alike showed a surface so wooden and dead that I could not keep my mind.on the page. How can you care who committed a murder which has never really been made to take place, because the writer hasn’t any ability of even the most ordinary kind to make you see or feel it? How can you probe: the possibilities of guilt among characters who all seem alike because they are all simply names on the page? It was then that I understood that a true connoisseur of this fiction is able to suspend the demands of his imagination and literary taste and take the thing as an intellectual problem. -But how you arrive at that state of mind is what I do not understand. The Addict’s Defence My experience with this second batch of novels has, therefore, been even more disillusioning than my experience with the first, and my final conclusion is that the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking. This conclusion seems borne out by the violence of the letters I have been receiving. Detective-story readers feel guilty, they are habitually on the defensive, and all their talk about "well‘written" mysteries is simply an excuse for their vice, like the reasons that the alcoholic can always produce for a

drink. One of the letters I have had shows the addict in his frankest and most shameless phase: This lady begins by trying, like the others, to give me some guidance in picking out the better grade stories, but as she proceeds, she goes all to pieces. She says that she has read hundreds of detective stories, but "it is surprising how few I would recommend to another. However, a poor detective story is better than none at all. Try again. With a little better luck, you'll find one that you admire and enjoy. Then you, too, may be A MYSTERY FIEND." This letter has made my blood run cold: so the opium smoker tells the novice not to mind if the first pipe makes hinl sick; and I fall back for reassurance on the valiant little band of readers who sympathise with my views on the subject. One of these tells me that I have underestimated. both the badness of the detective stories themselves and the lax mental habits of those who enjoy them. The worst of it is, he says that the true addict, half the time, never even finds out who has committed the murder. The addict reads not to find anything out, but merely to get the mild stimulation of the succession of unexpected incidents and of the suspense itself of looking forward to learning a sensational secret. That this secret is nothing at all and does not really account for the incidents does not matter to such a reader. He has learned from his long indulgence how to connive with the author in cheating: -he does not pay any real attention when the disappointing denouement occurs, he does not think back and check the events, he simply closes the book and starts another.