The Manawatu Daily Times Detective Stories

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 7210, 17 July 1933, Page 6

The Manawatu Daily Times Detective Stories

That many gi'cat men spend their leisure hours reading detective stories has long been widely known. Mr. Stanley Baldwin has never concealed his fondness for the Sherlock Holmeses and the Trents of fiction. But now it appears that some learned men spend their leisui’e hours in writing them.

Mr. G. D. H. Cole, who is reader in economics at Oxford, writes in collaboration with his wife widely read detective novels. Dr. Alington, who has just resigned the head mastership of Eton, also relaxes himself by producing this kind of fiction; while Mr. J. C. Masterman, a tutor of Christ Church, Oxford, and a well-known historian, lias recently written a detective story concerned with happenings in his own university.

This is a development that might justifiably be made the occasion for national rejoicing. If books must be written there is a lot to be said for getting them written by thoughtful people. Particularly is this so when the book in question happens to be a detective story. For the detective novel falls into two classes, one of which is extremely undesirable.

A large proportion of detective stories consists of tales that are indistinguishable from those in the crime news of the tabloid Press. They are a tissue of homicides, robberies, and ill-doings of every conceivable description which their authors wallow in without the slightest artistic justification.

There is, however, a small number of detective stories whose object is far different from mere sensationalism. These emphasise, not the details of the crime committed, but the ingenuity of the problem set the detective and the reader, and the skill with which the solution is worked out. Their interest is primarily intellectual, like the interest of a game of chess.

It is in the hope that they will popularise this kind of story instead of the other that one welcomes into the detective field the learned scholars of Eton and of Oxford.