29 JUNE 1929, Page 28

Sleuths and Slayers

The' Best Detective Stories of 'the Year. 1928. With as introduction by. R. A. Knox. (Faber and Gwyer.. 7s. 6d.)

WaNr is a detective story, Father Knox asks in his introdue7 tion ? In little more than sixteen pages of shrewd comment on modern crime fiction and its extraordinary popularity, he solves his question and several others by the way. •

The reason why a bOok like this Mikes such good holiday reading lies not in an unhealthyappetite for the morbid,-but rather in a very human deiire for a Coinplete art forni. History cannot provide this, nor science, nor life as it is lived day by day. In history and in real life, stories end in an unexpected or slovenly faShion. They, too, have their fascination, but their plots are either beyond human grasp, or need close and laborious attention before they can be unravelled. The same is true of science : in the end -its most-exciting problems are unsolvable. So we may imagine the detective story as having been evolved by a historian-journalist-scientist who was determined that his characters and his inanimate -material should behave exactly as he wanted them to do. Moreover, this age is analytic. The building up of a plot in fiction suits a certain mood, but there is also a distinct pleasure in the reverse process.

Instead of asking ourselves, " What will happen ? " (or " Will anything ever happen ? " in the modern sex novel) it is amusing to ask oneself, " What has happened ? 7 and to stop reading at•the appropriate moment, say when the police- sergeant and country doctor have just found the old gentleman dead with his head in the gas oven, and the yoUng nephew is explaining how he has discovered the tragedy (see Mr. Kelman Frost's " The Late Edition") and attempting to solve

the mystery for ourselves. - • • •

We suapeet the nephew of course. As Father Knox points out, we are so sophisticated nowadays that if a corpse is found in the garden we are sure the crime was committed elsewhere and the body brought there by car ; if the victim seems to have taken an overdose of chloral we know there has been a struggle far away ; if there arefinger prints on a window-sill, they belong to an innocent person ; • and if a scapegrace brother is supposed ta-have- died in :Canadai..-he.418.-oertain * bob up again in London ; but in this particular instance we do not see how the Crown can possibly shake the nephew's alibi.

But he has forgotten one thing. In making it appear that his uncle had hermetically sealed up the kitchen before suffo- cating himself with gas at about six o'clock in the evening, he had used. . . . But no ! This story is one of the' best in the book and certainly too good to spoil by a premature denoument. Murder will out. That is the excellent, if somewhat too optimistic moral twenty times repeated in this volume.

In most of the stories he has chosen for us, which include the work of such masters of their craft as Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes, Mrs. Christie, Baroness Orczy, and Messrs. J. S. Fletcher, Gilbert Frankau, Denis Mackail, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Father Knox indicates the caesura-or point at which we should shut the book up and go for a stroll round the garden before reading any further. It is curious that this editorial device has not been thought of before. The whole point of a detective story is that we should " spot the villain," or at least experi- ence the thrill of having suspected the wrong person. To do 'this, we must collect 'the necessary evidence, yet not be told !too much.

Some modern writers make a deliberate caesura (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did so, of course, with his immortal Holmes and -Watson), but many of the cleverest of these stories defy such analysis by editor or reader. They grip the attention from first to last, but never give one time to think how it all-hap- 'pened. Mr. Mackail, for instance, takes all the liberties that a genius may with his material. We are introduced to a delightful artist who _ sat in a public house after his work rather than slake his mild thirst either in the Athenaeum or the Daffodil Tea Rooms, for " in the former he had no qualifi- Cation for being seen alive, while in the latter he had no wish to be seen dead." He has a talkative Italian model, and a detective friend who consults him about a safe stolen from a Post Office. There is no kind of _clue or apparent mechanisin about the story ; it seems to just ripple along as things do- in 'real life—yet how rarely does any incident conclude as neatly as Mr. Mackail contrives his ending !

There are as many rules for .making a detective story- as there are for writing a play, but the best of both flow through all rigidities and create a " true illusion " of life. Only two other stories besides Mr. Mackail's conform to this standard : in Mr. J. S. Fletcher's " Mr. Legatt Leaves His Card " and in Mrs. Christie's " The Tuesday Night Club," the characters 'are of such flesh and blood as we may meet every day, and the things that happen to them do not Seem complicated or improbable. But we have no right, and indeed should have no desire, for an exact representation of everyday existence in this kind of writing, which is really a game between author and reader.

We want to escape from real life, we want to play at being detectives ourselves, and we have every right to do so. Father Knox-has skimmed the cream of the contemporary magazines, and has made a book out of the work of these twenty clever writers which is a joy to read and a pleasure to talk about or think over.