--; Death 'and Detection"'
BY SYLVA
7s. fici.)
JUDGING from the present selection, one might say that the crime department of our fiction was run by 'and for the. male. Not only have we ten authori to one authoress, but authors and villains are in unflattering agreement as to the merits of women: Mr. Hichens gives us a self-possessed but only middling-clever home-wrecker, Mr. Maceture's heroic villain murders women as a duty towards God and man, Herr Haul's resourceful hero wipes. Mit an entire civilization because a hospital nurse -will not look at a cripple. To Mrs. Peck, our only authoress, a tribute is due for having invented a couple of grim Scotswomen with intelligence enough to plan a careful murder and stand by its consequences.
But this is no way to review crime stories. It is only an excusable escape,- for the length--of a paragraph, from gangs and fingerprints, corpses and sudden truths. We must rescue Mr. Hichens from this company, too, although his new novel centres in a murder trial. Neither an alarmist nor a modernist, Mr. Hichens takes his leisured pace. He gives us over five hundred closely-printed pages, largely filled with dialogue against a background of dinners in great houses attended by perfect buttling. If the technique, like the social setting, has a pre-war quality, it is deftly manipulated. Mr. Hichens has the art of creating suspense abruptly, in the course of social prattle, by a word or gesture, and of working up finally to a climax of excitement. Sir Malcolm Keane, K.C. (why has he almost borrowed the name of- a well-known actor ?) is the defending counsel for the lovely Mrs. Paradine, accused of the murder of her elderly husband. While Keane is deeply attracted by his client, the judge, renowned with 'all for his severe sentences and with some for sadism, is known to be influencing the jury out of anger against women and Sir Malcolm because the latter's wife has refused to yield to him. There is melodrama and some avercolouring in this situation, which is further complicated by Mrs. Paradine's relations with her husband's valet. But the story grips. and the end of it—Keane's failure—is not shirked. Unfor- tunately Mr.: Hichens has been compelled, for the sake of suspense, to keep Mrs. Paradine's thoughts and actions in the dark, whence they never emerge satisfactorily. She is convincing neither as woman nor monster, and the book is weakened . by this juxtaposition of a man whose thoughts and emotions are sensitively explored, and a woman almost as featureless as the female puppet in a thriller. True, Mr. 'lichens makes her a Dane ; but even Denmark could produce Hamlet's Queen and some others.
Herr Kaul has opposite aims from Mr. Hichens. Instead of five hundred pages of domestic drama, he gives us in half that length the rapid destruction of the race. Ernst Hargon, resenting the world's (find Sister Elizabeth's) treatment of him, deprives humanity of its memory by introducing a bacillus of his own discovery: I doubt the- science of this bacillus question, but it is not for a layman to drop further bricks here. Let us swallow this camel, then, and watch humanity becoming imbecile : first a village, then a country, and then all the . civilized legions of all countries, and a harvest of chaos. There is a train smash, a mine disaster, a sea tragedy. . . . All this should have gone straight to a film company instead of to a publisher, for it is good cinema but crude fiction, and contains not even the shadow of a philosophy to justify it. There ought surely to be a tax on novelists who-use the machinery of world destruction for a joy ride. __ _ _ Mrs. Peck favonrslegitimate ingredients for her first novel ; a large house near Edinburgh, a proud old family repre- sented by two elderly, sisters and their outlying connexions, a system of.petty quarrels and jealousies, a period when the motor-ear was new. Besides these, she has the ingredients of a detective story c 'a stolen family jewel and the seven- weeks'-old body of one of the elderly sisters rotting in an. outhouse. And the ingredients blend. A perfect piece of detection is worked in with a careful and delightful family picture, so that for once the characters are not made to fit the crime nor the crime to fit the characters, 'nit the whole episocle,, ghoulish as it may be, seems a genuine event in the faTAPY's histA4r3T. : "-: The other books on the list are for the most part placeable in the ranks of Fiction written to Formula. The place, the crime, the solution—with an unbeatable detective working through a gallery of stock figures—is the commonest formula. There are exceptions. Mr. MacClure, in .Deuth Behind the Door, has so far defied convention as to disclose his murderer early in the book and allow his detective to abandon the case through lack of direct evidence. The departure is brave, but not altogether effective; for the interest suffers by the division of attention between the villain's character and the detective's clues.. Mr. Phillpotts, in The Captain's Curio, also hovers between the rival claims of motive and method, though with more success. Both motive and method are original. The latter gives the book its title and provides some nimble detec- tive work, but the former contains possibilities. A doctor led coldblobdedly into theft and murder by his philanthropic interests is a figure interesting enough to serve the author in place of bombshells. Here again we are let into the mind of the detective, and so into the secret, half way through the book. If any crime stories can be called quiet, both of these are. As in Mrs. Peck's novel, we are in a world sufficiently near reality for murder to appear as an outrage casting its livid glamour on the painstaking inquiries that follow it. But neither .Mr. Phillpotts nor Mr. MacClure has made the human interest strong enough to save the book entirely from dullness.
Mr. Meynell, in Paid in Full, stages his murder in a country house, and uses the assembled party's emotional cross-trails and irrelevant actions to baffle the reader and enrich the plot. Safe from the charge of dullness he makes the opposite error of turning finally to an excess of sentiment and melo- drama. Mr. Brian Flynn, with no great obligations to humanity makes merry with three murders in three consecutive chapters, and gives Anthony Bathurst a good game with their intricacies. For we have now reached the cross-word-puzzle type of - detection. Mr. Van Dine, is, on the whole, an adept at it. In his latest case he allows Philo Vance to display an expert knowledge of Scottish terriers, Chinese ceramics and—this seems a weakness—the detective novels of Edgar' Wallace. Another weakness, in a puzzle so full of ingenuity, is the coin- cidence whereby two men decide independently to murder the same victim on the same evening. Admitted that murders and murderers are cheap here, one still prefers the knot to be unravelled into a single string. And what about Vance's future ? He might have solved four murders with the brains he has expended on this one.
But we finish with brains now. The last three books show murder running completely amok in a mad world of gangs and heroes. Both Sapper and Mr. Hume are full of glorious thrills, good spirits and breathlessness.' Their pace is so swift that the first corpses are a mere hors d'oeuvre, forgotten long before the feast ends. Mr. Hume baffles us, before the intended baffling- begins, with a first chapter almost in the Hardy manner. It is soon lived down and forgotten ; but The Death Ship, with its disappearing- crew, is one long opportunity for a Conrad story, badly missed. The numbers of rapid thrills that take its place seem to have damp squibs in them, and the " love interest " is provided by an intrepid airgirl who tempts me to end this notice by referring back
to its opening senteneei — -
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