Darwinian Detection

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 362, 31 May 1946, Page 14

Darwinian Detection

BY the time this paragraph appears in print, 3YL’s listeners will be aware that Madame L’Espanier and her daughter Camille were torn in pieces, thrown out of the window and stuffed up the chimney by no human hands, but by those of a large orang-outang who, like the far more convincing specimen in Kipling, had too much Ego in his Cosmos. This four-episode dramatisation of Edgar Allan Poe’s cheering little story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" has

not got very far towards presenting the essence of this early bird among Englishlanguage detective stories. It seems to miss both the horror, the characterisation, and the satire-being content in its action to display nothing more than excitement, represented by rushing about with low cries. The story of how the Englishman said it was a French voice, the Frenchman said it was an English voice and the Dutchman said it was a Swedish voice, when all the time it was’ the gibbering of an incensed anthropoid, is a good one; but if the compilers of the serial were aware of this they have not put it over. Introductory remarks seemed to promise us a series of radio versions of Poe’s stories. I do not quite know if this can be successfully done. Poe’s horror formula was far too subjective to admit of serialisation. A good reading might do wonders with the temperature of the public’s spinal cord; but the dramatic method does not sound promising. .