A little time ago the well-known book reviewer Howard Spring was violently attacking the passion for detective stories, which he said were 2 mere narcotic, of the trashiest kind, which effectually killed the taste for Hood 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 star ies 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 fag well as successful way unanswer~ able evidence that virtue need npt be dull and unattractive, 'Miss Sayers told us also something about the Detection Club, whose members pledge themselves' to show the reader every clue that the detec tive 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 artifelal and kill one's interest. And one feels cheated if the murderer proves to be some tone not on the stage from the very beginning.
It is odd that all detective stories nowadays must contro in a murder. Sherlock Holmes's adventures " Cand surely there Is an indefinable something about them which no later rivals have surpassed) only deal in a few instances with murder. Robbery, forgery and false impersonation gave him and his reader just as good a run for their money. Perhaps out demand for murder now is the pression of suppressed homicidal in-That would wreck Miss claim for the morality of arian critic who observes that it is only in English-speaking countries that detective stories flourish, and tributes it to the peculiarly' judicial mind of the Anjlo-Saxon enabling him to see both sides of a question and to weigh the pros and cons. This fis one for Howard Spring. When we Food a detective story we are not drugging our minds but sharpening our Judicial faculty.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.