Northern Adventure

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 379, 27 September 1946, Page 10

Northern Adventure

Me: and Mrs. North, the heroes of the | Lockridge novel-writing team, were already known to me as having begun their career with a series of New Yorkerish misadventures and then having bent their steps into the strange world of crime detection, while retaining their affably scatty outlook. In the radio series which began from 3YL the other night, they were still dashing blithely from cadaver to séaffold over the conventional obstacle-course.. How characteristic of the day is this mingling of murder with ultra-light comedy. What the multiple slaughters of Punch and Sweeney Todd were to the 19th Century primitives a multitude of amiable nitwit *sleuths are to ourselves; a means of robbing one of the more fatal crimes of its terrors by associating it with fantasy. But the more olden time worked by isolating the factor of the macabre and exaggerating it so madly that it lost all seriousness: the Lockridges and their kind eliminate it altogether (I except Damon Runyon and a few others) and make the actual murder nothing more than a point of departure for the aritics of the detective-clown. As often as not the corpse is a cypher, a literary convention, and the whole point and purpose of the story is the fantastic maze of the clues and the detective’s behaviour. Even the murderer pales to insignificance beside him.