THE CASE AGAINST THE THRILLER

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 13, 30 July 1945, Page 8

THE CASE AGAINST THE THRILLER

BY.

In an editorial of a few years ago, the Times Literary Supplement had this to say : “ The literary die-hard’s case against the thriller crumbled when the dreadful truth was revealed that Cabinet Ministers, Bishops, Judges, dons, members of the Royal Society, and even Royal Academicians were unashamedly thrilled by the thriller.” In the Nation of November 25, 1944, Joseph Wood Krutch wrote : “ It is read either aggressively or shamefacedly by nearly everyone, and it must be, at the present moment, the most popular of all literary forms. To these witnesses to the popularity of the thriller dozens of others from literary sources and one’s own personal acquaintance could be added. The fact with which we are faced is that this literary form has been accepted as defensible reading by the educated (including W. B. Yeats, Woodrow-Wilson, T. S. Eliot, and Andr6 Gide), and that the literary defence which was at first apologetic has become markedly more emphatic and positive in the last few years. This change in tone can mean one of two thingseither the detective novel has improved to the point where it passes the tests for good literature, or the critical judgment of the educated reader has deteriorated. I am going to argue that, unfortunately for the health of literature and criticism, it means the latter.

Let me begin with a very obvious admission : some detective novels are better than others. The Sherlock Holmes stories are better than the Colwyn-Danes of the Champion, the Lord Peter Wimsey stories better than those of Edgar Wallace and Ellery’’ Queen. But what I will not admit—and cannot admit without viola-

tion of my standards of judgment and reason—is that detective stories are ever good literature. The proper business of literature is, and has always been, to interpret man to man, to show human nature in action, to illuminate any and every aspect of experience by the power of the creative imagination. This is something that the detective novel is prevented by the conditions of its existence from doing. Its emphasis is invariably and inevitably on the kind of plot which keeps the reader guessing, springs a dramatic surprise, and ties up all the loose ends with a neatness unknown in real life.

To this main purpose all else must be subordinated— character, inner conflicts, the clash of ideas and codes, and the emotional quality and significance of experience. If the writer becomes more interested in these than in the mathematical formulae of his plot, he then engages in the proper business of literature and ceases to write detective fiction. Dreiser’s American Tragedy and Dostoevskii’s Brother Karamazov always seem to me highly illuminating illustrations of my argument. Both contain all the elements of the detective story, and any one of the dozens of competent detective story-writers could translate either into a very effective example of the type they traffic in. But Dreiser and Dostoevski were more interested in telling the truth about their characters —why they were as they were, what went on in their minds, what forces within themselves and without they had to struggle against in limiting the number of loose ends in the interests of a neat plot with a crushing climax. In the latter part of his career

Dickens wrote some novels— House, Our Mutual Friend, Edwin Drood which contain the elements of the modern story of mystery and detecton, but, like Dreiser and Dostoevski, always remembered his proper business. As Edmund Wilson puts it {New Yorker, October 14, 1944), he “ invested his plots with a social and moral significance that made the final solution a revelatory symbol of something that he wanted seriously to say.” A few years ago, when it became obvious that the intellectual classes were now reading thrillers, the customary defence was that they were a ” harmless form of relaxation.” The Press, Christchurch, published in 1937 or thereabouts a symposium containing the views of a clergyman, two members of Parliament, two professors, a farmer, a soldier, the town clerk, a doctor, a detective, and one or two others. All except one member of Parliament, the detective (!), and the doctor (“I read them when I was twenty, but I have never become twenty again ”) were more or less regular readers of detective stories, and three of them defended their taste on the above ground. The clergyman said, ” most of them are harmless and enjoyable, provided they keep off unpleasant subjects, which are not at all necessary. I think that a clever mystery tale trains the mind ” ; one professor said, ” I find them a good form of mental relaxation ” ; the soldier said ” they are often a source of harmless relaxation.” In an article contributed a year or two later to the literary page in the Wellington Evening Post, “ A.M.” went further : “ The intellectual, poor chap, is expected to be strung up all his waking hours. Very seldom does he live up to such a standard ; he believes in relaxing now and then. Thereby he strengthens his taste and widens his sympathies.” He went on to suggest 1 that a cause of the great popularity of the thriller was ” dissatisfaction with the tiresome psychology and sex-saturation of so many contemporary ' serious ’ novels ” —an explanation that was echoed by the Dean of Durham when he stated : ” The modern novelist has driven some of the most respectable of us to detective stories where, if one is not on the side of the angels, one is at least on the side of

the police.” More recently still, Joseph Wood Krutch and Bernard de Voto have repeated this explanation in slightly different form, arguing that the serious novel has become so philosophical, psychological, and symbolic that readers have abandoned it for the detective novel which remains true to the story-telling tradition.

These explanations and excuses really all carry their own reply; they are boomerangs of a devastating sort that in themselves supply convincing evidence that the critical judgment of the educated has deteriorated. Consider the excuse of “ harmless relaxation.” Applied to reading, “ relaxation ” can have only one meaning—” lowering our standards and accepting books that we know are not good for the sake of an ephemeral excitement. he descent of the clergyman and the others from the higher to the lower level means, of course, that harm has already been done to their taste, else they would not feel the need or the desire to read at the lower level. A.M.’s contention that, by relaxing, the intellectual “ strengthens his taste and widens his sympathies ” is an amusing sophistry, like the clergyman’s, ” I think a clever mystery tale trains the mind.” If the questions are asked ” Strengthens taste for what ? ” ” Trains the mind for what ? ”, the logical answers must, be “ Strengthens the taste for detective stories and their like,” ” trains the mind

for more mystery tales.” It is naively foolish to argue that one’s taste for the good can be strengthened by making a willing emotional response to the bad, or that an acceptance of the falsified picture of human life in the detective stories can widen one’s sympathies with real people. Obviously “ strengthens ” must be “ weakens,” and “ widens ” must be “ narrows.” Such reading is scarcely “ harmless relaxation ! To lay the blame for one’s taste for thrillers on the psychological and philosophical tendencies of the serious novel is no less foolish. If he were restricted to

a choice between the two types—the philosophical novel and the thriller — discriminating reader who could not read the former would stop reading modern fiction. But there is no question of any such restricted choice ; among the thousands of novels published every year there are many that are neither tediously philosophical nor detective stories; a considerable number of them are realistic

novels in the story-telling tradition. Though not very good, they are likely to be much better than detective stories ; at least some make an attempt to tell the truth as well as tell a story, which the thriller cannot do.

Anyway, the discriminating reader’s choice of reading is not confined to modern fiction or to fiction alone, but ranges through literature of all types and periods.

The implication that if serious modern fiction fails you there is nothing else to read but the thriller can be made only by those whose scale of values has gone wrong. Few of the critics who defend the thriller dare claim that any examples of the type are among the great books. What they do claim, however, is that some of the best modern prose is to be found in the better detective novels. Edmund Wilson’s reply seems to me to be adequate. “ I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well . . . But really she does not write

very well ; it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level. In any serious department of fiction, her writing would not appear to have any distinction at all.” (New Yorker, January 20, 1945.) Wilson’s strictures, of course, apply even more to the less literary practitioners — Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, &c.

I shall quote a paragraph from B. M. Trevelyan’s English Social History (p. 582, Eng. ed., 1944), which not only states the main cultural problem of which the intellectual’s attitude to the thriller is an important part, but also leaves no doubt as to what the responsibility of the educated person is. “ Our modern system of education . . . has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals. Consequently both literature and journalism have been to a large extent debased since 1870, because they now cater for millions of half-educated and quarter-educated people whose forbears, not being able to read at ah, were not the patrons of books. The small highly educated class no longer sets the standard to the extent that it used to do, and tends to adopt the

standards of the majority (my italics). If the lower forms of literature and journalism do not completely devour the higher, it will be due to improved secondary and higher education forming a sufficiently large class to perpetuate a demand for things worth reading.”