Evening Star Newspaper, March 12, 1933, Page 53

Fiction Features PART 7. CLUB FOR “BETTER MURDERS™ Here Is the Inside Story of One of England’s Strangest Societies. A Club of Writers Who Seek to Keep Mystery Stories Inside the Literary Laws, Who Ban Mumbo Jumbo and Coincidence as Aids to Their Sleuths and Who Promise Never to Hide Vital VERY now and then, even in this age of organization and efficiency, we experience the Old World thrill of hearing that a real de- tective has really detected some- thing. In England it is especially the habit of the popular press to announce new light on old crimes which for a decade or two have been contentedly left in complete darkness. If our hus- tling journalists continue these exhuma- tions and dig up more and more of these doubtful or unidentified corpses, there is every reason to hope that eventually the police will find a clue to the mys- terious murder of William Rufus and deduce step by step the secret story of what happened to Julius Caesar. In the newer countries, from time to time, we are startled to hear of the arrest of a smuggler whose contrabrand goods have long been conspicuous on nearly every dinner table or convention- ally handed round in every social circle of the best people. Some gallant and adventurous agent will descend into-the underworld and drag out of their dark and secret den the gang that has been publicly governing a great city for the last four or five years. Such is the tech- nical superiority of modern scientific methods that traces can now be found even of the most widespread and world- wide organigations. At any moment we may hear that the police of Europe or America have seen with their own eyes a colossal factory or dump of dope or ammunition or have detected a revolu- tion while.it is actually raging in the streets. But though detectives may de- tect armies of gunmen or gangs of revo- lutionists, there is a limit to their lurid and uncanny power. ° - Sunfy She Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C, MARCH 12, 1933. - Art Notes BT)-;T( $ 16 PAGES. i et it S— Clues From the Reader. “So far we have confined ourselves strictly to killing people on paper.” Drawn for The Star Magazine by Stockton Mulford. BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON SO far as I know, no detective has ever detected the Detection Club. De- tectives have even been asked to dinner by the club; but I never could be cer- tain, from the expression on their faces, that they had detected it very much. It is a very small and quiet conspiracy, to which I am proug to belong; and it meets in various London restaurants and discusses various plots and schemes of crime. True, our ostensible object is to embody the results of discussion not in crime, but in crime stories. I am not here to rend the veil from private life or even to exhibit any morbid curiosity about it; but I have every reason to be- lieve that Mrs. Agatha Christie and Freeman Wills Crofts and the other Mmembers of the club have not, in fact, ever experimented in the coarser and more carnal manifestations of homicide, but have hitherto confined themselves strictly to killing people on paper. The club is,-in short, a small society of writers of detective stories; and its only object, beyond the higher and more ideal object of amusing itself, is best summed up in two statements: (1) That a detective story is a story, and subject to the same literary laws as a love story or a fairy story or any other form of literature; and (2) that the writer of a detective story is a writer and is just as much bound in the sight of God and ~man to be a good writer as if he were the writer of an epic or a tragedy. . It was only a historical accident, and. the historical accident of a specially un- historical period, that so many serious readers got the notion that a detective story was what was once called a shilling shocker, with no more intellectual ambi- tion than a penny dreadful; or what used to be called, in America, a dime novel. There is nothing in the nature of a tale of murder and mystery to prevent Dante or Shakespeare from writing in that form; indeed, $imere are many things in Dante and Shakespeare that are much more like a good shocker than they are like a priggish and pretentious novel about sociology and education. It was precisely the aim of the old re- ligious or tragic traditions that death, or the revelation of death, should come as a shock. Both are exactly contrary to the skeptical, callous or indifferent spirit of those who describe all change as what they would call a gradation, or what some of us would call a degra- dation. The - detective story has not shared any of the modern forms of degradation. I have already remarked that the shocker is now the only book that is not merely shocking. As one who has more than once had the honor of imposing the oaths of admission on new members of the so- ciety, I take a pride in setting out these conditions of membership in their actual form; thereby setting a good example to the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, the IHuminati, the Rosicrucians, .the Red Badgers, the Blue Buffaloes, the Green Gorillas, - the League of Lefthanded Haberdashers, the Association of Ag- nostic Albinos and all the other secret societies which now govern the greater part of public life in the age of pub- licity and public opinion. We are a private society, but not a secret society; and the following is the exact formula of initiation, drawn up by one or two of the most rising and distinguished writers of English detective fiction. The ruler shall say to the candidate— M. N, is it your firm desire to become a member of the Detection Club? Then the candidate shall answer in @ loud voice—That is my desire. Ruler—Do you promise that your de- tectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on’ nor making use of divine revelation, feminine intuition, mumbo-jumbo, jig- gery-pokery, coincidence or act of God? Candidate—I do. Ruler—Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? Candidate—I do. . Ruler—Do¢ you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, death-rays, ghosts, hypno- tism, trap-doors, Chinamen, super- criminals and lunatics; and utterly and forever to forswear mysterious poisons unknown to science? Candidate—I do. 1 Ruler—Will you honor the King’s Eng- lish? Candidate—I1 will. Then the ruler shall ask—M. N., is there anything you hold sacred? The candidate having named a thing which he holds of peculiar sanctity, the o mnmmaznn |}