Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsThe Strand Magazine, June 1929
IT is an odd fact, frequently commented upon by thoughtful observers, that most of the great plagues in history have crept on the world insidiously and without warning. Nobody notices that anything in particular is happening, until one day the populace wakes up to find the trouble full-blown in its midst.
In the Middle Ages, for instance, everything was perfectly peaceful and normal—knights jousting, swineherds tending pigs, land-owners busy with soc and seisin and all that sort of thing—when one morning—on a Tuesday it was, six weeks come Lammas Eve—a varlet, strolling along the road between Southampton and Winchester (where the filling-station is now) encountered a malapert knave and fell into conversation with him after the sociable fashion of those days.
“How now?” quoth the varlet.
“Ye same to you,” said the knave, courteously.
After which, as usually happens when two sons of the soil get together for a chat, there was a pause of about twenty minutes. At the end of this period the varlet spoke.
“In my village there hath chanced a happening,” he said, “which hath caused much marvel. Rummy, is ye general verdict. Old Bill of ye Mill suddenly turned black yesterday.”
“Black?” said the knave, wondering.
“Black is right.”
“Well, by St. James of Compostella, if this doth not beat ye band!” exclaimed the knave. “Down where I live, George ye Cowherd hath turned black, too."
“Thou dost not say!”
“Of a verity I do say.”
“What can have caused this?” cried the varlet.
“I could not tell thee,” said the knave. “I am a stranger in these parts myself.”
And a week later the Black Death was all over the country, and a man who did not look like Al Jolson singing “Sonny Boy” could scarcely be found anywhere.
In much the same way, quietly and, as it were, surreptitiously, the present flood of Mystery Stories has engulfed the British Isles. Only a short while ago the evil appeared merely sporadic. Now we are up to our necks in the things, and more coming all the time. There seems to be some virus in the human system just now which causes the best of writers to turn out thrillers. This would not matter so much, only, unfortunately, it causes the worst of writers to turn them out, too. The result is that this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-Paradise, this fortress built by Nature for herself against infection and the hand of war, this happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive of a house—I need scarcely say that I allude to England—has degenerated into an asylum full of goofs reading one another's detective stories. And ninety-nine out of every hundred a dud.
A disquieting thought.
IT does not seem to occur to the ordinary man how hard it is to do this sort of thing well. If I had a son who was thinking of writing mystery stories—and if I had a son of an age to hold a pen that is certainly what he would be doing nowadays—I should take him aside and try to point out some of the difficulties lying in his path.
“James (or John),” I should say, “think well! Never forget that over every mystery story there broods the shadow of a yawning reader saying, ‘What of it?’ You tell him that Sir Gregory Bulstrode has been found murdered in his library. ‘Who cares?’ is his reply. You add that all the doors and windows were locked. ‘They always are,’ he says. ‘And suspicion points to at least half-a-dozen people,’ you scream. ‘Oh, well,’ he mumbles, dozing off, ‘it turns out in the end that one of them did it, I suppose?’ ”
That is the trouble. For the mystery novel Suspicion Handicap, the field is limited. You know it wasn’t the hero or the heroine who did the murder. You are practically sure it couldn’t have been Reggie Banks, because he is a comic character and any vestige of humour in any character in a mystery story automatically rules him out as a potential criminal. It can’t have been Uncle Joe, because he is explicitly stated to be kind to dogs. So you assume it must have been some totally uninteresting minor character who hardly ever appears, and who is disclosed on the last page as the son of the inventor whom the murdered man swindled forty years ago. At any rate, you know quite well it’s one of them.
If I were writing a mystery story, I would go boldly out for the big sensation. I would not have the crime committed by anybody in the book at all. Here are the last few paragraphs of a little thing I could write in a couple of weeks if I had not a soul above this form of literature.
“You say, Jerningham,” I gasped, “that you have solved this inscrutable problem? You really know who it was that stabbed Sir Ralph with the Oriental paper-knife?”
Travers Jerningham nodded curtly. I was astonished to see that he displayed none of that satisfaction which one would naturally have expected.
“I do,” he said.
“But you seem gloomy, Jerningham—moody. Why is this?”
“Because it is impossible to bring the criminals to justice.”
“Criminals? Was there, then, more than one?”
“There were two, Woodger. Two of the blackest-hearted menaces to Society that ever clutched a knife-handle. One held Sir Ralph down, the other did the stabbing.”
“But, if you are so sure of this, how is it, Jerningham, that you cannot give the scoundrels their just deserts?”
Travers Jerningham laughed a bitter laugh.
“Because, Woodger, they aren’t in the book at all. The fiends were too cunning to let themselves get beyond the title-page. The murderers of Sir Ralph Rackstraw were Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton.”
The End.
That would be something like a punch. And it is punch that the average detective story lacks.
IT will be noted that in the above I have stuck to what I might call the Gents’ Ordinary or Stock-Size detective. Travers Jerningham, if he ever comes to fruition—if fruition is the word I want, a thing of which I am by no means sure—will be just one more of those curt, hawk-faced amateur investigators. It is not merely that I cannot be bothered to vary the type; I feel that, if you are going to have an amateur investigator, this even now is still the best sort to employ.
The other alternatives are, of course—
(a) The Dry;
(b) The Dull;
(c) The Effervescent;
and I am not very fond of any of them.
The Dry detective is elderly. He wears pince-nez and a funny hat and is apt to cough primly. He is fussy and old-maidish. He comes within an ace of doddering. Of course, get him in a corner and he suddenly produces a punch like a prize-fighter; but out of his corner he is rather a bore.
Not such a bore, of course, as the Dull detective. This is the one who unmasks criminals by means of his special knowledge of toxics and things and gets on the villain’s track owing to the discovery that the latter is definitely brachiocephalic. This bird is a pest.
The Effervescent detective is rather a new invention. He is a bright young fellow of independent means whose hobby is the solution of problems. They like him at Scotland Yard, and he chaffs them. Sometimes Inspector Faraday is a little inclined to shake his head at the young man’s suggestions, but he is the first to admit that Tony Dalrymple has an uncanny knack of being right. And the dear chap is so delightfully flippant with it all. None of that “Holmes, who has done this fearful thing?” stuff about him. Violence to the person cannot damp Tony’s spirits, provided it is to some other person. Viewing the body brings out all that is gayest and sprightliest in him.
“So this is the jolly old corpse, is it, Inspector? Well, well, well! Bean bashed in and a bit of no-good done to the merry old jugular, what? Tut, tut, mother won’t like this at all. You’re on to the fact that the merchant who messed this cove up was left-handed and parted his hair in the middle, of course? And a good job he made of it, didn’t he?”
Not a frightfully attractive young man. But spreading, I regret to say. You meet him everywhere nowadays.
The best detectives—Edgar Wallace’s—are always Scotland Yard men. To a public surfeited with brilliant amateurs there is something very restful about the man from Scotland Yard. He has a background. You can believe in him. If I found it impossible to head my son off from writing mystery stories, I should certainly advise him to give his heroes an official standing. Then he would have the Record and Finger-Print Department at his back, and if he wanted to stop the villain leaving London could tell off three thousand policemen to watch the roads.
It is true that the villain would get through just the same, but you can't say it isn’t nice to have the sympathy and moral support of three thousand policemen.
I HAVE got James—or John, as the case may be—pretty clear, then, on the detective end of the job. He has now to face a far more serious problem. What of the villain?
Villains in mystery stories may be divided broadly into three classes—all silly:—
(a) Sinister men from China or Assam or Java or India or Tibet (or practically anywhere except Ponder’s End and Peebles), who are on the track of the jewel stolen from the temple.
(b) Men with a grudge which has lasted as fresh as ever for thirty years.
(c) Master Criminals.
With regard to (a), I should advise James to try almost anything else first. I rather fancy that sinister jewel-trackers have about reached saturation-point. Besides, what I might call the villain-supplying nationalities have grown so absurdly touchy these days. Make your murderer a Chinaman now, and within a week of your story’s appearance letters are pouring into the publisher’s office, signed Disgusted (Peking) and Mother of Five (Hankow), protesting against the unfair libel. Go elsewhere and you run up against Paterfamilias (Java) and Fair-Play (Tibet). It is not worth it.
And yet the idea of falling back on (b) is not agreeable. The age in which we live is so practical, so matter-of-fact. We are no longer able to believe as readily as our fathers did in the man who cherishes a grudge for a quarter of a century. It was all very well in the old days, when there were fewer distractions, but what with Golf and Tennis and Cross-word Puzzles and the Flat-Race Season and the Jumping Season, and looking after the car and airing the dog and having to learn how to score at Contract Bridge, it seems simply incredible that a man should be able to keep his mind on some unpleasantness which happened in the early spring of 1904.
Which brings us to the last class, Master Criminals.
The psychology of the Master Criminal is a thing I have never been able to understand. I can follow the reasoning of the man who, wishing to put by something for a rainy day, poisons an uncle, shoots a couple of cousins, and forges a will. That is business. It is based on sound commercial principles. But the Master Criminal is simply a ditherer. He does not need money. He has got the stuff. What with the Delancy Emeralds and the Stuyvesant Pearls and the Montresor Holbein and the bearer bonds he stole from the Bank, he must have salted away well over a million. Then what on earth does he want to go on for? Why not retire?
But do you think you could drive that into a Master Criminal’s head? Not in a million years. I have just been reading the latest story about one of these poor half-wits. This one, in order to go on being a Master Criminal, was obliged to live in a broken-down cellar on a smelly wharf on the river, posing as a lodging-house keeper. All he did with his time was chop wood in the backyard. And at a conservative estimate, after paying salaries to his staff of one-eyed Chinamen, pock-marked Mexicans, and knife-throwing deaf-mutes, he must have been worth between two and three million pounds.
He could have had a yacht, a fleet of motor-cars, a house in Grosvenor Square, a nice place in the country, a bit of shooting in Scotland, a few miles of fishing on some good river, a villa on the Riviera, and a racing-stable. He could have run a paper, revived British opera, and put on Shakespeare at popular prices. But no, he preferred to go on living in his riverside cellar, which was flooded every time there was a high tide, simply because he wanted to be a Master Criminal.
One scarcely knows whether to laugh or weep.
I remember one Master Criminal, just as rich as this man, who set his whole organization at work for weeks digging a tunnel into a bank. And what do you think he got out of it? Twelve thousand pounds. Not guineas. Pounds.
Twelve thousand pounds! Can you beat it? Just about what I am paid for writing this article.
PERHAPS, on the whole, then, James, you had better avoid all three of the types of villain which I have mentioned and stick to the Fiend in Human Shape. This variety has the enormous advantage that he has not got to be made plausible. He is a homicidal lunatic, and as such can get away with anything. To the man with the thirty-year-old grudge we say, “But, my dear fellow, consider. If you stick that knife into Sir George, what of the future? What will you do in the long winter evenings with no dream of vengeance to nurse?” To the Master Criminal we point out that he is giving himself a lot of trouble to add to an income which is already absurdly large. He cannot like having to put on false whiskers and stand outside the hero’s bedroom on a chilly night, pumping poison-gas through it, or enjoy climbing up a slippery roof to drop cobras down the chimney. But the Fiend in Human Shape we merely pat encouragingly on the back and speed on his way with a cheery “Good luck, Fiend, old man! Go as far as you like!”
And he gnashes his teeth amiably and snaps into it with an animal snarl.