Getting Under Our Skin

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 545, 2 December 1949, Page 11

Getting Under Our Skin

ECRETS of Scotland Yard is a firmly established ZB favourite and the urbane Clive Brook has a long series of successful narratives to his credit. The

success of this series is largely due to j the style of the narrative, which exploits ironic understatement and avoids the degeneration into the merely sensational or macabre which is the bane of this type of serial. Occasionally, however, the method fails. The excursion Clive Brook took across the Channel to examine the methods of the French police, as a contrast with English ways of outwitting the criminal, was a case in point. The Weidmann crimes were not a happy choice, for the cheerful even flippant manner of the narrator jarred upon the listener. The idea of murder, conducted cold-bloodedly as a private business, stirs uneasily the thin curtain of our civilisation. Crimes of passion, crimes even of the worst degenerates, we find more bearable than the thought that a man can comfortably and peacefully exist in our society at the expense of a little care and two bullets per person administered in the nape of the neck. Chaplin, you may recall, tried to bring out some of the deeper implications of this theme in. his film Monsieur Verdoux, and was not wholly successful; Clive Brook was no more successful in trying to avoid them.