MEET THE DETECTIVE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 170, 20 July 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

MEET THE DETECTIVE.

ORIGINS OF CHARACTERS.

WRITERS DISCLOSE,

(By CYRANO.)

Let me begin with a true story. The other day in a New Zealand metropolitan lending library, thirty new "thrillers" were put out on the shelf reserved for this class of fiction. In ten minutes they were all gone. I will not point the obvious moral, but I may remark on the interesting coincidence for me that I heard the story while I was reading a new book* in which a number of writers of "thrillers" tell the public how they came to create their heroes. The fact that these "confessions" were originally 8.8.C. talks is also significant.

Tho mystery of intellectual creation can be, at least so it may be .argued, even more baffling than that of physical. At least we can see the egg, and we know the conditions in which it is fertilised and hatched. But how does thought come? You may say it comes from the brain, but how? One moment a line of poetry or a character in fiction does not exist; the next moment the line or the character is born. There is, however, at least this resemblance between the two processes, that a great deal of creative art springs from something definite and tangible in real life. Characters, for example; many of them are suggested by living people —far more than most people realise.

Creating from Life. I am no psychologist (ah, you knew that already), but is it an untenable theory that no character in fiction is created entirely by his author—that every character owes something to the author's observation of his fellow humans? We do know that the greatest ■writers have borrowed in this way, and been aware of it: Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith, to name only a few, drew from real people. Even a writer's own family is not spared, as witness Dickens and Samuel Butler. And in this book before me creators of detectives and adventurers admit their debt to real life.

Here is the story of Sherlock Holmes referred to again—how Conan Doyle modelled him on the ways of a professor at Edinburgh. Mr. Sax Rohmer tells us that he got the idea of Dr. Fu Manchu from seeing, one foggy night in Chinatown, a tall and very dignified Chinese alight from a car with an Arab girl. Before that he had found no romance in Chinatown, but this glimpse set his mind working. Sydney Horler literally ran into a man in Regent Street and heard a lazy voice drawl, "Sorry, old son." The stranger was tall, broadshouldered, athletic, tanned, faultlessly dressed, evidently a personality —the Scarlet Pimpernel type, a man born for

adventure. At that moment the character of Tiger Standish was born. But a writer may dramatise himself. Dr. Austin Freeman tells us how he came to write the Tliorndyke stories. He himself began to be interested in forensic medicine in his student days. He was profoundly impressed by the dramatic quality in leading cases. For twenty years his interest lay dormant, and then, compelled to give tip medicine by illhealth, he thought, why not emulate Conan Doyle and put his medical knowledge to literary use? Why not a detective story based on medical jurisprudence? When he had worked at the Westminster' Ophthalmic Hospital it occurred to him as he wrote out prescriptions for spectacles that such a pair afforded infallible proof of identity. He drafted a story on these lines, and put it away. That was the real origin of Dr. Tliorndyke.

Anthor's Confessions. A variety of experiences may produce characters. "Sapper" tells us that the idea of an avenging Bulldog Drummond came to him when he played golf with a man who annoyed him almost to the point of murder. Mr. A. E. W. Mason, one of the most accomplished craftsmen in this line, says that the idea of "At the Villa Rose," the first of the Hanaud series, first came to him through the scratching of two French names on a window of an English inn, names connected with a murder in France. Hanaud himself is a composite portrait made as a result of a study of the memoirs of chiefs of the Paris Scotland Yard and personal acquaintance with a great French detective. On the origins or Chief Inspector French and Superintendent Wilson their creators throw little or no light. They just "came." _ But Mr. and Mrs. Cole—those distinguished economists who write detective stories as a sideline —write entertainingly about their creation. Mr. Cole had an illness, and was ordered off work, and he wrote a detective story because, so he said, that wasn't work. The idea of the Scarlet Pimpernel came to the Baroness Orczy on the platform of a London underground station on a foggy afternoon —about the last place you would suppose that highly efficient exquisite to appear. And, would you believe it, when she had put him into a book, she could not get a publisher to accept him. They all said books about the French Revolution were dead. So the Baroness Orczy made a play out of the Pimpernel, and the success of the play in the provinces encouraged her to try the book 011 another publisher, and he said that he made a practice of submitting all manuscripts ir* new authors to his mother, in Cornwall. She approved, the play came to London, the book was published on the same day, and fortune arrived. The play has been played over 4000 tmes to Englishspeaking audiences, besides French, German, Italians, Spaniards and Poles, and in book form (I presume the Baroness refers to the series) the Pimpernel's adventures have sold by the million. All from an inspiration in the London "underground." And what a queer trade publishing is!

To most detective story "fans," however, the most interesting "confession" in this book concerns " Trent's Last Case." The position of this classic is unique. It is twenty years or so since it appeared, and recently it was given the honour of an edition dc luxe. It was placed first among mystery stories in a recent vote of "Observer" readers. Yet Trent, so his author says, appears in only one book. I have seen one short story in which Trent figures, but nothing else. Why did Mr. E. C. Bentley never exploit further this brilliant field of his? Why haven't we been given other Trent stories? There may be an explanation in these comments by Mr. Bentley. He says the story was written in response to a challenge by his friend Mr. Chesterton, and that the tale got completely out of hand. It was meant to finish one way in Chapter XI., but it finished in quite another in Chapter XVI. Mr. Bentley says his idea in writing the book was to create a detective who laughed and frivoled; Sherlock Holmes and his earlier imitators were always sternly serious. (Incidentally, Mr. Bentley says that all detective stories since Holmes, including his own, have been founded more or less on the Holmes stories.) Mr. Bentley was one of the earliest of the writers who broke away from the tradition of sternness. We now find wit and humour in detective stories, and an astonishing erudition. But Mr. Bentley did something more. He wrote a story that had real literary charm and a philosophy of life. Will he not change his mind and give us more of Trent?

There are three notable absentees— Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey and Father Brown, a group whom many students of this class of fiction might place at the top of the list. Dorothy Sayers, the mother of Lord Peter, is the most brilliant of all contemporary writers of detective stories, unless we except Mr. Chesterton, and his Father Brown is marked out from all others by his calling. , Father Brown. Agatha Christie's Totrot illustrates the revolt against the good-looking, romantic sleuth. Hercule is insignificant in appearance. Lord Peter Wimsey, on the other hand, is dashing as well as erudite, a cousin of Trent's" and a kind of likeable Philo Vance. It is a pity that their creators do not tell us how they came into being. Mr. Chesterton, however, has already described how he thought of Father Brown. Hearing two university undergraduates talking patronisingly about Catholic priests' lack of knowledge of the world, Mr. Chesterton recalled what a priest friend had told him of a case of perversion that had come under his notice, and the idea came of a priestdetective who would solve mysteries just because he knew human nature so well. As Cardinal Manning had to remind a bumptious journalist who questioned his knowledge of London morals, there is the Confessional.

•"Meet the Detective," by "Sapper," A. E. W. Mason, Sax Rohmer, Baroness Orczy and others (Allen and Unwin).