Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsTit-Bits, December 14, 1929
THE world owes much to its authors.
It is an unquestionable fact that, if an author wields a trenchant pen and has the courage to speak out fearlessly, he exerts a remarkable influence in the way of reforming abuses.
Dickens, for example, must undoubtedly be given the credit for the disappearance of schools of the Dotheboys Hall type. Galsworthy has brought about much-needed improvements in our prison system. And, if I may speak about myself, a few months ago I wrote an article censuring playwrights for their habit of allowing dead bodies to fall out of the fireplace.
Since the appearance of that article, I am informed, this has been changed. They now drop mostly from the ceiling or in some cases from the chiffonier, so that it looks as if I, too, were a Force. I am encouraged, accordingly, to embark on another crusade.
The Blackbird Gang.
A popular crusade it will be, one that should have the support of all right-thinking men. We all read sensational novels nowadays, and we have all uttered hopeless little moans as the hero, busy searching for clues, hears the door open, looks up, and sees coming into the room a girl so lovely that for an instant his heart seems to stop beating. What I propose to do is to remove the heroine from the sensational novel.
Whoever first got the idea that anyone wants a beastly girl messing about and getting in the way when the automatics are popping and the blood flowing nicely, I am at a loss to imagine. Nobody has a greater respect than myself for girls in their proper place; but that place, I maintain, is not Lascar Joe’s Underground Den at Limehouse on a busy evening.
Lovely Woman seems to me to lose her queenly dignity when she is being shoved into cupboards with a bag over her head. And, if there is one thing certain, it is that sooner or later something of the sort will be happening to the heroine of the thriller.
She has a mania for letting herself be kidnapped. The fact is that, though beautiful, with large grey eyes and hair the colour of ripe corn, her mentality is that of a cockroach—and not an ordinary cockroach at that, but one with water on the brain. She may have escaped death a dozen times. She may know that the notorious Blackbird Gang is after her, to secure from her the papers. The police may have warned her on no account to stir outside her closed door.
But when at half-past two in the morning a messenger calls with an unsigned note saying “Come at once,” and that messenger is a one-eyed Chinaman with a pock-marked face and an evil grin, she trusts him immediately, accompanies him to the closed car with steel shutters over the windows, and bowls off in it to the ruined cottage in the swamp. And when the hero, at great risk and inconvenience to himself, comes to rescue her, she will have nothing to do with him because she has been told by a mulatto with half a nose that it was he who murdered her brother Jim.
Masked Men and Millionaires.
This girl must go. We readers demand it. We know that the publishers want a female in the story so that they can put her on the jacket with her hands clasped and a wild look of agony in her eyes, but nevertheless we stick to it that she must go. Better a jacket with only a masked man pushing a paper-knife into a millionaire in his library than the continued poisoning of our favourite fiction with imbeciles like Myrtle or Gladys or Elaine or whatever her name may be.
We readers have our rights. Mark that, Hodder. You hear me, Stoughton? We can be pushed just so far. And we mean business. Treat us right, and you may have our florins and half-crowns for ever. Continue to inflict these female goofs on us, and we shall dispose of them elsewhere. Even to-day there are a few novels published where nobody gets murdered. We like thrillers, but we can take them or leave them alone. Drive us into a corner, and we can quite easily spend our money on tales of quiet domestic love. Take your boy-friend into a corner, Stoughton, and talk it over.
What we all liked so much about Sherlock Holmes was his correct attitude in this matter of girls in mystery stories. Sometimes he permitted them to call at Baker Street and tell him about the odd behaviour of their uncles or stepfathers, but once the story was under way they had to retire into the background and stay there. He would never have dreamed of . . .
Ah! Here comes Stoughton back again, with a nasty, obstinate look on his face. We thought as much. He won’t do it. He says he must have those female-interest jackets. Very well, then. We will now take steps. If he won’t get rid of the heroine, we must find somebody else who will. (Because I was only bluffing just now when I said that to Stoughton about being able to stop reading thrillers. We can’t, of course. We’ve got to read them. And Stoughton knows it. He thinks he has us in a cleft stick. But wait!)
Does He Know His Job?
As every thoughtful man must have reflected, there is no evil for which Nature does not supply an antidote. For the cobra there is the mongoose, for dyspepsia the bicarbonate, and for the heroine the villain.
The obvious person to get rid of the heroine is the villain, and it cannot be denied that he does his best. And yet, for one reason or another, he always fails. Why is this? Why, even when he has got the girl chained up in the cellar under the wharf with the water pouring in through the grating, do we shake our heads moodily and refuse to entertain any real hope for a happy ending? I will tell you. It is because we know that we cannot rely on the villain. The man has let us down too often. He has forfeited our confidence. We know him for what he is, a broken reed.
He has every good quality but one. He has zeal. He has courage. He has perseverance. And he hates the heroine as heartily as we do. But all this avails him nothing, for he lacks intelligence. He needs careful schooling. And this is what I propose to give him.
Broadly speaking, the trouble with every villain of every sensational novel is that he suffers from a fatal excess of ingenuity. When he was a boy, his parents must thoughtlessly have told him that he was clever, and it has absolutely spoiled him for effective work. Ingenuity is a good thing, but he overdoes it.
The Light That Fails.
You or I, Reader, when circumstances compel us to murder a female acquaintance, borrow a revolver and a few cartridges and do the thing in some odd five minutes of the day when we are not at work in the office or watching dog-racing. We don’t bother about art or technique or scientific methods. We just go and do it.
But the villain cannot understand simplicity. A hundred times he manœuvres the girl into a position where one good dig with a knife or a carefully directed pistol-shot would produce the happiest results, and then, poor ass, he goes and ruins it all by being too clever.
On these occasions it never occurs to him just to point a revolver at the heroine and fire it. If you told him the thing could be done that way, he would suspect you of pulling his leg. The only method he can imagine is to tie her in a chair, erect a tripod, place the revolver on it, tie a string to the trigger, pass the string round the walls till it rests on a hook, attach another string to it, pass this over a hook, tie a brick to the end of the second string and light a candle under it. He has got the thing all reasoned out. The candle will burn the string, the brick will fall, the weight will tighten the first string, thus pulling the trigger, and there you are.
Then somebody comes along and blows the candle out—and all the weary work to do again!
I have known villains sit the heroine on a keg of dynamite and expect it to be struck by lightning. You can’t run a business that way.
Still, it is no use being angry with the poor fellows. They are doing their best according to their lights. It is simply the result of trying to tackle a highly specialized job without the requisite training. What the villain needs is to forget all he thinks he knows and go right back to the beginning and start learning the business from the bottom up.
The keynote of the curriculum of the school which I propose to found will be a rigid attention to simplicity and directness. The pupil will receive at first what may be called kindergarten tuition. For the greater part of his opening term he will confine himself to the simple task of swatting flies. From this he will work up through the animal kingdom in easy stages till eventually he arrives at heroines. By the time he has taken his degree, the Myrtles and Gladyses will be climbing trees and pulling them up after them to avoid the man, for by then he will be really dangerous.
The great difficulty, of course, will be to restrain and check that infernal ingenuity of his. The average villain’s natural impulse, if called upon to kill a fly, would be to saw away the supports of the floor, tie a rope across the doorway, and then send the fly an anonymous letter urging him to come to the room at once in order to hear of something to his advantage. The idea being that the fly, hurrying to the room, would trip over the rope, fall on the floor, go through into the depths, and break its neck.
It’s All Wrong!
That, to a villain’s mind, is not merely the simplest, it is the only way of killing flies. And the hardest task facing the instructors at my school will be to persuade him that excellent results may be obtained through the medium of a rolled-up newspaper, firmly gripped by the Insurance Coupon.
Once, however, he had grasped this, his progress should be rapid. His natural enthusiasm would spur him on. He would know that if he did succeed in murdering a heroine a wave of gratitude would pour out towards him from a million hearts.
The maddening thing is that it is only when dealing with heroines that villains become so beastly clever. With anybody of their own sex they can be as straightforward as you or I. Millionaires get knives in the back, traitors bullets through the heart.
It is only when faced with the task of disposing of the heroine that the man starts all this business of suspending snakes from the chandelier and fooling about with bombs that can only be exploded by means of a gramophone record with a particularly high note in it. And, of course, a man full of that sort of idea is not going to learn in a day that the best way of disposing of a girl with hair the colour of ripe corn is to lure her somewhere dark and lean a bit of gas-pipe against it.
But patience! He will learn it in time, and then we shall see what we shall see.
Note:
Expanded from “A School for Movie Villains” (1915); in turn, the present article was adapted and combined with other material for the chapter “Thrillers” in Louder and Funnier (1932).
Printer’s error corrected above:
Magazine, p. 435c, had “compe” for “compel”