DETECTIVE STORIES AND REAL LIFE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3463, 31 March 1930, Page 2

DETECTIVE STORIES AND REAL LIFE.

(By Arthur Maclieu.)

It was in the Tremendous 'Nineties. I had just been introduced to Mr Henry Harland, and had been expressing to him the very great pleasure with which I had been reading his exquisite story, “Mademoiselle Miss ’—a much better book, as I tlynk, than the more famous “Cardinal's Snuffbox.” My observations on this topic went very well; every lellow iikes a hand, as Mr Foker so justly observed to the young Pendennis. But a little later in the talk 1 blundered badly. I said I enjoyed “Sherlock Holmes.” Mr Harland looked incredulous and contemptuous. “Not really?” lie sai 1. with a very cold gaze in my direction. But I stood by my word, and thereby, 1 believe, lost all hope of being asked to write lor the Yellow Book. And I still stand by my word, both as to - “Sherlock Holmes” and to all good detective and mystery stories. For all such tales are profoundly true to life, as true to life ns, the gossamer webs ol psychology spun by Henry James and Ids school, and to me, at all events, of far more vivid interest. I know that there is an assumption that sitting in drawing-rooms and experiencing tenuous and subtle emotions which do not lead anywhere in particular in life, while obscure and mysterious crime is not die. But this s an assumption and nothing more; and it is 'demonstrably a false assumption. Mysterious crimes and enigmatic events abound in history and in the daily paper. ■ Take the Campden Wonder, ol winch Air Masefield made a play. A respectable land agent goes for -a strp.l and disappears. His hat, Ins hands, and Ids comb are found by the roadside, and Ids hands are bloody. W hoi e,Upon Ids man-servant accuses housed, Id-s brother, and Ids mother of murdering iMr Harrison, the land agent. Nobody is found, but the three are diny banged. And in a little under two years Mr Harrison came back and said 'he had been seized by unknown me.'i, taken to Deal, and shipped as a slave to Smyrna.

Then there is the disappearance ol Sir Benjamin Bathurst, Ambassadoi Extraordinary to Vienna, who vanished awfully in the twinkling of an eye from Perleberg in Prussia, u< the year 1803, whose exact fate is uncertain to this day. And then, in low life, there is the mystery of Elizabeth Canning, the little servant girl of the seventeenfifties. ' She disappeared Irom the London streets, and reappeared in a month’s time with'a tale of adventures that nearly hanged an old gipsy woman. Elizabeth’s story was all lies, but nobody knows nor ever will know where Elizabeth spent that January of 11753. And, at the moment of writing, the papers arc occupied with two strong© and obscure murders in Lugland, and a series of crimes, with no apparent motive, in Germany. All this is, evidently, life, and a proper subject for the writer. In a broad sense, then, the detective storv and the mystery story are true to life, so far as their subject matter is concerned. But I would not maintain that the methods of the detective of fiction are those by which actual crimes are usually detected. In actuality, I am told, the first tiling that Scotland Yard docs is to run over its .list of criminals, to decide from the stvle and manner of the crime to whom it may probably be attributed, and then ask A. B, C and D to account for their movements on the night of the robbery or the murder. Here we have rather the methods of the art critic, pronouncing against ai reputed Rembrandt or in favor of a questioned Vandyke than the chain of deduction and inference in which Dupin and Sherlock Holmes excelled. -» But, it will be noted, this most sensible system only applies when the deed is the work ol the habitual criminal. If the outsider, the mere lawful citizen, suddenly commits murder; if, again, there is no obvious motive lor the crime; then the Yard is often baffled and sometimes one may surmise, the murder is not accounted murder at all, but passes for death from natural causes.

But considering Sherlock Holmes and his tribe from the viewpoint of actuality, the weakness of their methods no doubt lies in this; that the criminal puzzle is like the crossword puzzle: it may have many possible solutions. Poo, who invented this literary mode, as he invented the mode of pirates and the mode' of the cipher and the mode of terror, once tried his method of deduction on a case in real life. ‘‘The Mystery of Marie Hoget” was, in fact, the mystery of Mary Bogers, a New York girl who was found murdered. Poe transferred the scene from New York to Paris, and with an exquisite chain of reasoning brought home the crime .to a naval officer. Nothing could he more convincing than this series of inferences; hut the conclusion was false, and the "naval officer innocent. And so we may say of the affair of the line- Morgue: Dnpin deduces tin ape from the fact that all the persons winy hear the murderer's voice* declare that the words were in some tongue that was unknown to them. The Frenchman . who know no German thought the language was German, the Italian, who knew no English thought it sounded like English, and so on. Hence, Dnpin infers, the sounds hoard wore of no human speech, and thus he cohies to his ape. Very well, indeed, in fiction; hut in fact a Gaelic speaking Highlander or a hig hl'ack man with an Alrican idiom might well have been the criminal.

The method of the detective in tie•tion. therefore, is seldom that ol actuality. Mat we gladly hear with this; departure from fact for the sain- ol tin- pleasure that it gives ns. Art must have its conventions. Nobody over talked in hexameters, or in blank verse—save Mrs Siddons, who said at dinner: “I asked for water, boy, yon give me beer”—yet we are very willing to bear with the rolling hexameters of Tfomer and Virgil, and with the blank verse of Hamlet and Maeheih. and so we may rejoice freely in the and elaborate chains ol detective reasoning, and question them no inort- than we question. ‘Tnfandnm. regina, jnhes rc nova re dolorem” or “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and In-

Hut this admitted uiul ulluwod lor, I am all tor the rigour j»f the game. I ail” (jiiito ready Id admit tlial Sherlock 11 id mes had “writ! eu little monograph mi the ashes ol I I<l dillerent varieties of pipe, cigar. and cigarette tobacco, ’’ ami that he was thus euahled to ideutil'v the ash (in “The lioscnmhe Valley .Mystery'’) as (lie product of tut Indian cigar. “of the variety which are rolled iu Rotterdam.“ 'lids T accept; hut I cannot accept Dr Watson as a general practitioner. “What do you think, Watson' Could yoit|- patients span* uut for a few hours “Have you a couple ol days to to spare'" . . “I really don’t know what to say, I have a fairly long list at present." “Oh, An.struther would do vnut work

And Watson rattles away to Paddington. No practise would stand it, and Watson would bo lucky if he did not get into grave trouble for gross neglect of his patients. I think I would have caused Watson to engage in research work, say, on “Some Varieties of Malaria peculiar to Afghanistan.” Such a task might well be dropped for a couple of days without endangering human life. And there is a serious offence and dereliction into which some detectives—never Sherlock—are apt to fall. They allow love to enter into ther activities; they become maudlin over some young woman they have not known for more than half an hour. This is a deadly error, in a good detective story there should be no love Interest, or at most an entirely subordinate one. I have no patience with tiie method of most American detective fiction, this consists in the casting of the- strongest suspicion on the murdered man’s wife, his brother, his uncle, Ids doctor, his solicitor, and his best friend; all in turn, one after another. Finally, it turns out that the deed was done by the boy who cleans the knives or, perhaps by the postman.

I lie good detective story and the good mystery story are always simple in their issues. There is one question in “The Moonstone”: “Who stole the jewel?” there is one question in Stevenson’-.-, great mystery talc: “What was the link between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?” There is one question in the best of the Sherlock Holmes series: “What was the Speckled Band?”