Murder Without Shock
75. 6d.) Stoughton. 7s. 6d.)
AFTER consuming a shelf-ful of new thrillers it occurs to me that the purveyors of this death-feast zieseive sympathy. They deserve sympathy, that- is, as individuals surrounded 1y a hostile army of their fellows. To be successful all these authors must achieve a baffling ingenuity, solve the mysterious and defy the impossible in a way no reader can guess.at. Yet they are constantly having their thunder stolen ; or we may put it that they steal each others'. This thunder, which is compounded for the most part of dark suspicions' and startling .discoveries, becomes so formal a factor that eventually it ceases to roll at all. Doubtless it still rolls for the author, at least in the better examples ; for it is easier to forget our thousand rivals while we-arc abserbed in working out a story, than to forget a thousand similarities while we read it. To 'my mind, if a detective story is to have full fcirce, it should he presented in the guise of an ordinary novel, with a title that contains neither the word " mystery " nor—and this is more important—the word " death." I have been assured repeatedly that " death ".doubles the saks. This it may do, but it ruins the surprise. If that first discovery Of a corpse could come to ns trailing clouds of horror, as it was meant to do, how different all our subsequent reactions would be But it is impossible to recapture the lost innocence. The most painstaking reviewer cannot become as a little child ten times in succession during a course of reading, and no choice is left but to accept these violent deaths as counters in a game instead of monstrosities in a life. _ What is more, they must be a certain type of counter. This is a fact that might have hampered Mr. McG uire. Before hie* tale begins an influential financier is said-to have com- mitted suicide in the lounge of one of his own hotels. Doubts are altimst immediately thrown on this case of suicide ; but even so the reader gets in first. Thrillers_do not begin with suicides ; they do begin with murders. Mr. McGuire, how- es"er, saves himself by going one better ; in fact by going one getter again and again. He introduces so many investigators of: doubtful character and so many rival theories about the first and second " suicide "i(there is- of course a second) that b3, ,the penultimate chapter we are even wondering whether sv4 have been not only side-tracked but double-crossed as well ; whether, in fine, the first suicide was a suicide indeed. This I take to be a fair achievement in puzzle-making. The prob- abilities wilt somewhat-on 'a close inquiry, and the disclosure On the final page, instead of simplifying, is in a sense a further complication, for it seems to give the game to an outsider. But sinee his motive is • an inside one, connected with those that dotninate the actors and investigators, we may judge the game
won fairly. -
The matter is otherwise in Death Comes at Night. (We may as! 'well have all the " Deaths " together.) If no qualities save unexpectedness- are .demanded in the solution of a mystery, this tale may pass. But in these eases we still have judgement : and there are Certain tricks that strike us as unfair and unresourceful. Coincidence is a poor card at any time, and when an unusual type of robbery, follows immediately on' 'a sentimental poisoning, all the aroma of India that Mr. Ingram carefully infuses into a DOrsetshire setting will not destroy our dciubts. The Face of Death has a similar yet a different fault. There is no major coincidence in it, but 'as the story progresses it becomes monstrously incredible, and slips rapidly downhill from the level of something very like a comedy of manners to something very like a novelette. The beginning is excellent. Mr. Gault, who uses himself as one of the-e.baracters, gives so true and humorous a picture of life in a Florentine pension, that even after the elderly spinster has
been poisoned; we can Still enjoy the storyilor its cunning observation and convincing background. Then it becomes lurid. A young woman has herself made into an old woman, two lovely girls are kidnapped, a sinister. doctor threatens, the women are about to he destroyed. . . . It reads rather us though some skimmer of- Mr: Gault's half:Written- manuscript had recommended a scuttleful of "pep" andpopularity, to get the public. If so, I can only suggest that Mr. Gault would get another public if he dropped the pep and popularity, for he is obviously capable of 'better work. • Mr. Ellery Queen comes before us with a swagger ; he is a Great Detective and he knows it. Has he not. solved Roman. Greek, French, Dutch and Egyptian Mysteries, and even lent - his name to the author of his being ? Now he elects to " deal
• with cowpunchers, six-shooters, lariats, horses, alfalfa, chaps " ; and sure enough, Buck Horne, whose dashing exploits on the silver screen had won a thousand Hearts, is shot at the Rodeo at the beginning of a " Rrrip-Snortin' Ride aroun' the A-re-nah, with Buck leadin' Forty Rrriders in a Hell-Bent-fer-Leather Chase ! " On the next. occasion of the Riride One-Arm Woody. is shot, and finally it will be found that although I have not reported much of the plot I have reported it wrongly. Here is .a breath from the " Great Open Spaces," which will serve when the cleverness of the deduc- tion and the trickery 'of `the murderer leave us' breathless. Mr. Queen makes no mistakes (if we except the French sen- tences in a chapter appropriately headed" The Impossible "), and there is a satisfying completeness about the story when it finally appears unravelled. Perhaps this is due to our easy acceptance of colourful behaviour as practised by cowpunchers and the alfalfa crowd.
However, Mr. Queen should look to his laurels. as a detec- tive, for we now have a lady in the business: Mr, Ross intro- duces us to Miss Patience -Thumm, daughter of the Inspector of that name. Miss Thumm reads Lady Chatterley's Lover (unexpurgated), -writes with a gay pen (or Mr. -Ross does so . for her) and helps her father and the elderly Mr. Drury Lane to solve another of these two-fold murder problems. But • Patience, despite her choice in literature, remains a -devotee of the old school in detection. She makes careful Holmesian inferences that areanly true because her author kindly allows them to be so. For instance, must broken finger-nails indicate a typist, or vice versa ? And must a hundred-page writing block infallibly possess its enact hundred pages when it comes from the shop ? Miss Thumm says "Yes" to both. perhaps these are only her'classical'exercises ; she may grow creative and impressionistic in her. next effort.. Apart from her, the problem is as neat a one as Mr. Queen's, if less sensational.
The murder:in Big Ben Looks On is staged in a Public School that is readily identified through the title. Mr. Guildford • has mixed his ingredients in generous measure, giving us a complete story of the love-affairs, hatreds, and complex—too complex—private activities carried on at school, with the addition of a musical Russian Prince and of a New York detective used (alas for America !) as a stalking horse by Scotland Yard in the discovery of a Bolshevist crime. Let me admit that the tale has more logic and less exaggeration than would appear . from this account, and that even the Bolshevist motive is handled with -intelligent sympathy and not used merely as the newest excuse for lawless horror.
After this last ease of detection proper, we have thrills in general: In Hermes Speaks -Miss Jaeger. has the original idea of introducing a spiritualistic voice that settles scientific and philosophical questions, and sets the world by the ears. Granted that the truth about this fake is almost as incredible as the voice itself, she nfiist yet be credited with making her thunder roll on a new note.—And so to the Islands. Traitor's Rock is a Hebridean island used by an old miser as a petrol base for German submarines during the last War. This story ' was surely 'meant to be grim, tense, lonely and inipiessive, but instead it wavers uncomfortably on the edge of parody, and topples straight into it with the ideritit;;-ievelations of the last chapter. TOM. Tiddler's Island is a brighter spot contain- ing a honeymoon couple, a hoarder of treasure, a gang of, roughs and a series of adventures.
Previous page
