LIFE AND FICTION

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 58, 12 March 1929, Page 5

LIFE AND FICTION

THE DETECTIVE STORY

MYSTERIES OF REAL DOINGS

It is not often that life imitates art quite so slavishly as in the mystery story that is intriguing us at the present time, writes J. D. Beresford in the "Daily Chronicle." TJiat murder in the garage, discovery of the body after two months, the clues, the strange evidence of the letters, without address or signature, addressed to Mr. Messiter at his lodgings, all these and other details come straight from the best detective fiction.

Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot could, 1 presume, make a very shrewd guess aB to how the crime was committed. I could devise a solution myself if I turned my mind to it. But the chances are that if Sir Arthur Conan Boyle, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Wallace were all set to formulate a theory from the facts so far published, all three theories would admirably cover the facts, but would be completely different one from another.

Yet i£ these famouß authors read one another's books, they are able, I suppose, to spot the murderer and his method before they are half-way through. If they cannot, there are certainly a few clever people who can.

' The difference between the two cases is to be found in the melancholy deduction that whereas writers of detective fiction always play the game, life does not. In fiction we could be perfectly certain that those letters would furnish the clue if we had the wit to interpret their meaning. In life, for all we know, they may have nothing whatever to do with essentials.

The letters, for instance, may have a strange and interesting origin, may in themselves furnish the details of a highly icupantic -jstory, but for all we can tell thf^ may have no bearing whatever on the mystery. But what I have been wondering is whether the tremendous spate of detective fiction during the past few years may not lead to the committal of more ingenious murders. The general reading public must now be highly educated in all those matters that a successful criminal in this sort ought to know. Many ingenious analytic minds have set out for us at considerable length all the oversights we must avoid 2 we wish to pit ourselves against the intelligence of the C.I.D.

We know now, or if we don't we have taken our reading in this relation very lightly, the various kinds of clues we may leave behind us, and how the perspicacity of the trained detective t will be able to in-' terpret them. Indeed, the technique of crime in this sort has been reduced almost to a science.

And although I am not suggesting that the ordinary member of the deteetive-story-reading public ia the least likely to be incited to crime by his knowledge of how the criminal of fiction is most easily detected, it ia quite possible-that if the criminal tendency is there to begin with, we have given an individual here and there many pertinent object lessons in the direction in which he has need to sharpen his wits. ,

On the other hand, I doubt if Scotland yard has found anything to learn from fiction, unless it be an occasional indication of method. For life, as I have said, does not "play the game, and is given to laying false trails. Nevertheless, one day —and it may be that the mystery cited here may prove to be the exception for which we are waiting—l confidently expect that the really typical detective story will be played out for us in the public print. A brilliant writer once wrote with the air of paradox that was so popular in his day that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. And when we come to analyse that apparently startling statement, we find that it is almost a truism.

For art educates our faculties and, through the imagination, the senses. To a generation brought up on chromolithographs, scenery will appear chromolithographic. We see that we have been taught to see. After a prolonged .study of futuristic arts, you will look for and find precisely the same effects in nature. So, on the same principle, it is probable that the modern excess of detective fiction tends to encourage more and more ingenious crimes. °