CRIME IN LITERATURE

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 140, 9 March 1929, Page 30

CRIME IN LITERATURE

The immense output of crime literature of the present day is the subject of much discussion among psychologists. Why, they ask, should contemporary men and women display an interest in crime so utterly unparalleled? Why should crime, as crime, have so far outrun all other motifs and Action that it is rapidly proving a rival to love itself? The first and most dominant human urge underlying this queer manifestation needs, surely, only to be stated ito bring instant conviction of. its primary importance—namely, the urge to escape from monotony. Who reads this flood of modern Action dealing with crime? Who reads these horror stories, these mystery stories, these detective stories? It would seem that by far the majority of such readers belong to the male sex I Crime literature is, bn the whole, a form of fiction written about men, for men, and by men. If the virility of a nation is to be judged by the. prevalence of its dominant tastes, but the United States and England must, in spite of certain cynical philosophers, have succeeded in remaining predominantly mannish. It is certainly sound psychology to associate the masculine passion for criminal stories with a desire to escape from the thralls of love. Thus while the love story remains, par excellence, the form of fiction dearest to modern women, the crime story, where love plays a subordinate and negligible role, will become what psychologists call the “masculine protqft.” The theory that men rather than women make up' the majority of both writers and readers of detective

stories might find further support in the psychological fact that men are much more detached from the ebb and flow of such natural forces than women are. Love, which is the inevitable note of the fiction women care for, is of all things the most upsetting to any. such logical pattern. The most criminal of women require a definite, concrete motive, usually a passionate motive for their deed. It is your proud and lonely man, separated from the natural impulses of the race by the fury of his abstract intelligence, who alone rises to the achivement of what might almost seem motiveless crime; and it is, of course, with the problem of finding a rational motive where none is obvious that the unraveller of complicated evidence is constantly occupied.

A rather ghastly hint fell recently from the pen of Maxim Gorki that the modern passion for crime stories encourages the committing of crime. The great Russian’s idea seems to be that this alarming result comes about in two ways—by exciting our sympathy for the criminal and by treating crime ip a completely cold-blooded, pseudomedical, pseudo-Freudlan manner. That modern crime literature may, as Gorki hints, play its part In creating a moral aura favourable to real crime is a suspicion that grows upon us when we compare it with its sister art, the movies. It may quite conceivably be the case that the triumph of “modern improvements” has not only separated the modern man from the stress of natural hardships but also pachydermatised his response to the natural human drama.