ook reviewer Howard Spring was Violently: attacking the passion for detective stories, which he said were a mere narcotic, of the trashiest kind, which effectually killed the taste for good literature. So it is only right that Miss Dorothy Sayers, admittedly the leading writer of detective books, should speak up for them. Primarily she defended the writing of such stories on highly moral grounds, saying that they were the only class in which virtue was consistently more attractive than vice, while the necessity of making the detective popular as well as successful was unanswerable evidence that virtue need not be dull and un attract Miss Sayers told us also something about the Detection Club, whose members pledge themselves to show the reader every clue that the detective.sees, not to make undue use of hypnotism,—trap-doors, mysterious Chinese and poisons unknown to Science, not to bag each other's plots, and as far as in them lies to write the King's English.
Some of these pledges obviously concern the reader more than others do. Any device which is outside the range of ordinary experience (the mysterious poisons for instance) make the whole story artificial and kill one's interest, And one feels cheated nowadays must centre in a murder. Sherlock Holmes's adventures (and surely there is an indefinable some-tee rivals have surpassed) only deal in a murder. Robbery, and false impersonation gave d his reader just as good a run for their money. Perhaps our demand for murder now is the exa of suppressed homicidal in-That would wreck Miss Sayers' claim for the morality of thriller wri tributes it to the peculiarly judicial mind of the Anglo-Saxon enabling him to sce both sides of a question and to weigh the pros and cons. This is one for Howard Spring.
When we read a detective story we are not drugging ai ds but sharpening our indic
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.