THE LURE OF GRIME.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 144134, 2 July 1913, Page 4

THE LURE OF GRIME.

THE GOOD-BAD HERO. FAKE REALIST WRITERS. Wo are filling our heads with a lot of sentimental nonsense when wo take it without question that the criminal of stage and fiction and tho criminal of real life arc one and tho same. Mr. Arthur Stringer, who knows something about h6th types, having dealt with thorn in real life tor the sake of his fiction; declares they are about as wide apart as tho poles. He finds it high time for someone to point out tins fact and to stop the stultification of one’s intelligence with such beliefs. Some of the ways iu which those so-called realists fool tho gullible among us aro set forth by Mr. Stringer in the New York Times Review of Books: ABSURDITIES OF CRIME-FICTION. “I know of one novelist who describes a safe-breaking scene wherein the mastor-erook attaches a wire to a chandelier and an electrode to tho end of tills wire, and by the deliciously naive means of a mere lighting circuit burns his way through a ponderous stool door. It would he no more ridiculous to-say that ho prised that door off with his fountain pen. Another novelist with an international reputation has his villain sit on a steamer’s deck and quietly read at the masthead an incoming wireless message. It is of littlo consequence, of course, that the professional operator in the wireless room is compelled to have, a microphone of the.most delicate nature, held close lo his car before he can even pick np that same incoming message. This same villain, I take it, could- stand on the Singer Tower and hear a hairpin fall off a bureau in Albany. An important feature in a reigning ‘realistic’ crook play is a Maxim silencer which is used ns a revolver, despite the fact that a silencer cannot he and never has been attached to a revolver. In still another Broadway slentli-nlay a woman under suspicion casually takes up a sheet of writing-paper from the desk of a man mysteriously murdered. The detective on .the trail of the offender holds up this shoot to the audience, showing the finger-prints thereon' impressed ns plainly marked as ink spots. Now. the murdered gentleman may or may not have had the hobby of inditing his correspondence on chemically sensitised notepaper. Or, on the other hand, the lady under suspicion -may .have been opening a tin of printer’s ink in one of the rooms off-stago. But without one of those two extremely remote contingencies, the over-convenient'appearance of those nice black biota must ho accepted as cither absurd or miraculous,” These are perhaps only absurdities showing how shallow is the author's real knowledge of crime. His portrayal of the criminal himself, Mr. Stringer avers, is a more open and offensive sin: NO ROMANCE IN CRIME. “There is no such thing as a romantic criminal. By this I mean that there is no romance about professional grime. There is no Raffles in real life. As M'Clnsky once said down at police headquarters; ‘A crook is a crook at heart. Day or night, drunk or sober, lie is swayed hr. his criminal instincts.’ "The playwright who exploits crime loves to have his hero had only nor’-nor’-east. When the wind is in, the other quarter lie is the gentlest of lovers and the most impeccable of characters. It is the same with the book criminal. Even his felonies aro prompted by a supposedly ameliorating love pf adventure. He follows the gentle art of burglary for the thrill that’s in it. He likes the game for the game’s sake. Ho makes housebreaking, and highway robbery lose half their evil by Using all their grossness. Ho seduces you into the'belief that it’s, quite fit and proper for him to take toll of tho over-jewelled ladies who are enjoying tho same weekend with him in the same, country house, or to exact midnight largesse from the altogether unsympathetic jeweller who-has not appreciated Ids dcvil-may-carc audacities, his good breeding! and his languidly enunciated epigrams. AVe remember that it’s only human to sympathise with the bad and tolerate the good. AVe follow our fic-tion-made villain through his round of denatured adventures; we feel that he is being true to some wider ■ scheme of things than the trivial laws that ho is breaking'; wo like to-witness his leap through.-the paper hoops of the temporal" wliilc swayed by those emotions which we regard as eternal, AVe watch him in a pink light., or wo sec him stalk through'his chapters like a Christy illustration, and we Imagine that we have at last come face to face with the sombre and true side of this seamy life of ours. But he’s no more the real criminal of to-day than is Ali Baba or Robin' Hood of yesterday. And his adventures are no more actual criminal life than were the adventures of the Forty Thieves. Ann are really eating pink gnmdrops and, from their colour, imagining them raw beef.

“The habitual criminal is always a defective. If he is not a weakling physically, he is a weakling mentally. His ranks arc recruited from incompetents and degenerates. His mind may not ditfer much from the ordinary man's in many respects, but it is a mind that is either stlpid and narrow on the one. hand or passionate and uncontrolled on the other. Ho has a craving for alcohol, for drugs, or for artificial and unhealthy excitement. Only too often his spirit has been further brutalised by the cruelties of gaol punishment. He is a man of no settled place of abode, no knowledge of trade, and no desire for honest work; no technical equipment for earning his-living; no place in tho industrial scheme of things. He is a graduate in idleness, who will, live off a woman if he is able to, club an invalid if need be, sleep in Verminous lodging-houses, and poison his own enfeebled body with fusel-oil whisky. Inspector Schmittberger once told how even Monk Kastman begged to bo put in a cell because he didn’t have a gun, and the Kellys were after him. ‘When I’d thrown him out of tho station-house,’ Schmittberger said, ‘he slunk into a hallway and went to his kennel by way of the roofs.’ And, as the same inspector has pointed out, the spirit of adventure no more enters into the make-up of the East Side criminal than does the respect for women or the will to work. As Schmittberger put.it, he’s usually a cadet out of work. . . A PITIABLE RUFFIAN. “Tho last time I was down at police headquarters I happened to see a burglar who • had , become famous, or, rather, infamous, in the evening papers.

This dcvil-may-carc robber, whose newspaper description had excited such sympathy among dovo-oyod ladies,was being put through his Identification Bureau examination, mugged and measured. I watched him take off his poor old. run-over, gnpinp-toed shoes to get ready for the Bertillon measurements. There wore no soles or feet left to his socks. Ho was not terrified, but just pathetically ill-nourished and ill-clothcd and anremic and unclean and sunkonchcekcd. His teeth were had, and his vapid blue eyes were foolish-looking. His whole life was foolish, just as his commitment for so many years up tho river must have struck the presiding judge as foolish, if that judge was a man of thought. "As Felix Adler Ims said, tho criminal instinct is more deeply rooted than is generally imagined. The more we aro hemmed in by law, tho more we like the man who ran defy what wo have to respect. Tho core of romance is peril. But there is much written about the wicked that will never ho literature, and the first and greatest reason why it can’t be literature is because it isn’t true. It is neither true to. humanity nor true to facts.”