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Southland Times, Issue 22969, 15 August 1936, Page 13

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Cyril Connolly thinks the detective story is being worked out. The demand for it is constant, but the powers of supply are variable. The reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and hard to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted. Mr Connolly proceeds to specify different types of detective fiction of which we are getting tired, and his list seems to include almost every known variety. What can be done about it? One possibility, he suggests, is for crime writers to concentrate once more on evoking horror, not by a succession of murders, which defeats its object, but by keeping the murderee on the scene long enough for the reader to get fond of him.