A Plea for Mystery Relief

No crisis accompanying the depression is more acute than that which exists in the realm of detective stories. Yet those who are at the head of our government have shown no concern. In fact, they have given no indication that they are even aware of the impending catastrophe. They have initiated plans for relieving the farmer, the banker, the railroad, and ‘the forgotten man,’ but they have made no gesture at all toward the manufacturer of mysteries.

In order to understand just how the collapse of the stock market has embarrassed this once-thriving industry, we must look, for a moment, at the raw materials which are used in the composition of a detective story. The essential ingredient in this product is a wealthy old gentleman who makes his contribution to the welfare of society by being found dead in the library. It is not hard to understand why such a gentleman is an ideal victim.

In the first place, he is old. He has lived out his allotted span. His gray head, battered in by a blunt instrument, may be a shocking sight, but it cannot cause the reader to shed tears, or to rebel against the author for allowing such an outrage to be perpetrated. Little Nell, strangled by an old pair of suspenders, never could be the starting point for a puzzle in crime detection. A mere glimpse of her white, angelic face, peaceful as if in resignation at being overtaken by so lamentable a fate, would not have the desired effect of arousing the reader’s curiosity as to the identity of the villain. Rather, it would stimulate intense and bitter reasoning on the heartlessness of Divine Omnipotence, or (if one is a humanitarian) the manifest imperfections of our unjust social order.

Then, furthermore, the old gentleman is wealthy. This fact also helps us to be reconciled to his untimely death. We cannot stand to see a poor laboring man done in in his kitchen, for our sympathies are aroused at once by the predicament of his family. Before we can go about our normal business of capturing the criminal, we have to take a collection for the destitute wife and eleven children, and by the time that task has been performed adequately the culprit will be in a far country where he can successfully resist extradition.

Finally, the old gentleman furnishes precisely the right number of motives for a murder. The richness of his personal effects justifies one in surmising that the butler coveted too strongly the casket of family jewels that was hidden behind the secret panel. Then, in his earlier years, the victim undoubtedly was a gay young blade, and there is the possibility that a cast-off woman has sought revenge. Sharp business practices and even surreptitious transactions with the underworld are not unthinkable. And of course there are always former journeys to India and China to suggest sinister complications. If a plausible motive is not to be found in any of these fertile fields, there is always the will that was about to be changed, or the unsuccessful attempt, on the part of the scapegrace nephew, to borrow money.

But the depression, we are told, reduced almost to zero the number of rich men. This was a severe blow to manufacturers of detective stories, but, be it said to their credit, they did not give up without a struggle. Deprived, through failure of the source of their raw material, of the one indispensable ingredient of a quality product, they began to cast about immediately for substitutes. College professors, famous athletes, gangsters, aviators, bishops, retired army officers, and Senators were slaughtered by way of experiment.

Although some of these made passable victims, all fell short of the ideal in some vital particular. Who would want to kill a college professor? And, after he is killed, how can we tell that he is dead? Athletes are too young and handsome to die, and to kill them in the first two pages is to squander talents that could be used to good advantage in pursuit of the quarry. Moreover, the athlete is too active to allow anyone to do him in with a blunt instrument. Thus a clue is removed, for the blunt instrument is always wielded by a left-handed man, and thus simplifies the search for the criminal. Only experts, however, can distinguish death resulting from the left-handed administration of a poison from death ensuing upon the righthanded administration of the same drug. And when an ambidextrous character enters the plot even Sherlock Holmes is baffled. Of all the substitutes, the Senators, beyond a doubt, are the most satisfactory. Yet they cannot be used extensively, for everyone in the United States has a motive for killing them. Moreover, no reader is going to travel over four continents and engage in weeks of painful cerebration merely to pay a sportsman his bounty.

Now it may be objected that the reverse which this industry has suffered is richly deserved; that mismanagement in the past has helped to make the situation acute. It is true that the builders of mysteries slaughtered so many wealthy old gentlemen that, even at the height of prosperity, students of the field were apprehensive lest all of the available raw material be consumed. It is to the discredit of the mystery writers that they were so unmindful of the principles of conservation as to slay wantonly, killing, for a single story, seven or eight victims when one would have done as well. Thus in history they will share the opprobrium of those men who killed thousands of buffaloes for the sole purpose of obtaining tongues and hides.

But calling attention to sins of the past will not help these workers in their present plight. Beyond doubt they are already sufficiently repentant. What they need, therefore, is not criticism, but help. If they do not soon secure some material aid, they are doomed.

Since, as I have shown, there is no satisfactory substitute, the government must take steps immediately to restore the wealthy old gentleman to his pre-war status. Otherwise the detective-story industry will collapse, and thousands of sleuths, English butlers, rising young reporters, Irish maids, attractive social secretaries, and termagant aunts will be thrown out of employment.

PAUL W. SPRAGUE