Evening Star Newspaper, March 12, 1933, Page 54

o e — ruler shall ask--M. N., do you swear by (here the ruler shall name the thing which the candidate has declared to be his peculiar sanctily) to observe faith- fully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a member of the club? But if the candidate is not able lo name a thing which he holds sacred, then the ruler shall propose the oath in the manner following—M. N., do you, as you hope to increase your sales, swear to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a member of the club? Then the candidaie shall say—All this I solemnly do swear. And I do Jurther- more promise and undertake to be loyal to the club, neither purloining nor dis- closing any plot or secret communicated to me before publication by any mem- ber, whether under the influence of drink or otherwise. Then shall the ruler say to the com- pany—If there be any member present who objects to the proposal let him or her so declare. H If there be an objector, the ruler shall appoint a time and place for the seemly discussion of the matter, and shall say to the candidate and to the company— Forasmuch as we are hungry and that there may be no unseemly wrangling amongst us, I invite you, M. N, to be our guest tonight, and I hold you to the solemn promise which you have given us touching the theft or revelation of plots and secrets. But if there be no objector, then shall the ruler say to the members—Do you then acclaim M. N. as a member of our club? Then the companry’s crier, or the mem- ber appointed thereio by the secretary, shall lead the company in such cries of approval as are within his compass or capacity. When the cries cease, whether for lack of breath or for ary other cause, the ruler shall make this declaration— M. N, you are duly elected a member of the Detection Club and if you fail to keep your promise, may other writers anticipate your plots, may your pub- lishers do you down in your contracts, may strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints and may your sales continually diminish Amen. Then the candidaie and after him all the members preseni shall say—Amen. I hope to be forgiven if I dwell with some fond gratification upon one or two of the principles mentioned in this great constitution of the republic of crime- lovers, or amateurs in the art of murder. The first provision, which eliminates the {~eternatural, both of the higher and the lower types, along with various mod- ern forms of the very modern vice of superstition, I need not discuss at length. To all true lovers of crime it will be apparent that a detective story must never turn into a ghost story. THIS is not because the writer believes in ghosts, or in some cases even In God, or in the general possibility of spiritual interventions from another world. On this matter the club shows the broadest and most tolerant spirit, several members notoriously in posses- sion of a Diety of some kind, have already managed to insinuate them- selves into its ranks. It is founded on the fundamentally sound principle that spiritual influences are infinite, whereas the police novel by its nature is finite. It is not fair if it is not finite; it is not fair if it does not work with a fixed and limited set of laws and conditions and as far as possible with a fixed and limited number of persons, places, exits, entrances and even opportunities. It is a game; and a game may be defined as an enjoyment of limitations, even of artificial limitations. To solve the problem of the shooting of a Wesleyan minister or some such simple and everyday affair by introduc- ing an afreet, an archangel, a witch from Endor, a winged horse, a Chinese dragon, a deceased relative exuding ectoplasm, or any such intruder on the family or the house party, is of the nature of cheating, exactly as it is cheating at chess to put an extra piece onto the board. Nor is it any the less cheating because the extra piece has, in appear- ance and ordinary action, the holy and sanctified character of a bishop. Anti-clericals may see a horrid sig- nificance in the fact that the bishop in chess_moves sideways, though they will “On in dyaEnley’ ‘ “Now, I can’t see how to solve this mystery myself.” Prom an eiching by Will Dyson, reproduced threugh courtesy of the Perarsil Galleries. find it diffcult to apply it to the un- chivalrous conception that the knight always moves crooked. But the point is that the game depends on there being a certain number of bishops on the board, and a certain number of moves for the bishop; and the game would break down as a game if the bishop could excommunicate the pawns instead of taking them. This logical and limited square, like a chessboard, which the French call the cadre, is in some degree necessary to all art; but is vitally necessary to the art of the detective story. Anybody can murder Wesleyan ministers if he is allowed to call spirits from the vasty deep to assist him; the problem is how best to perform the necessary task in a quiet, practical and economical manner with the tools provided at a particular place and time. When this principle is understood, it will be seen at once that it applies almost as strongly to the first things against which the neophyte is warned in the second clause: That is, against gangs and conspiracies. If there is a vast secret society whose ramifications spread from Jamaica to Japan, it is no matter of wonder that it can manage to knock off a Wesleyan minister or two in Wimbledon or Worthing. Not being a matter of wonder, it ceases to be a matter of mystery, and we might just as well try to make a detective story out of the dead body of one peasant left behind by the all-destroying march of Attila and the Huns. “All-destroying Attila” reminds me of the next item of death rays, on which I hold very strong views indeed. All will note the magnificent liberality and genercsity In the spirit of the club, in only asking its members to observe. “a seemly moderation” in the use of these three things, even of the last. For my part, I should not be sorry to see a death ray finally extinguishing all death rays. Wn:’nmvm I find & writer describing some marvelous man of science who is going to impose peace on the whole earth by the threat of a death ray—then I know not only that the 13 writer writes bad stories, believes in bad science and bad philosophy, but I also know he has had morals, a bad religion and a soul in a state of shock- ing and terrifying badness, though he may be entirely unconscious of it. I will not argue with him here; doubtless 'he himself is in a state of innocence— that is, of invincible ignorance. I will only say that peace by permission of an eminent man of science would be, if possible, rather worse than war; and life under the menace of a death ray would be considerably worse than death. I feel the same about the scientific internationalists who talk about war be- coming so frightful that no soldier would dare to fight. They do not seem to realize that they are boasting of hav- ing invented an instrument of torture so horrible that no martyr would ever dare to die for the truth. But these slavish and cowardly philosophies are at the very opposite extreme from the noble art of murder, or the detection of murder, as prac- ticed in the true defective story. All the rest of the occasions on which modera- tion is urged seem to me to be chosen with discretion and justice. I agree that the detective should be careful about tsap doors, both in theory and practice; but I think trap doors are much more .sporting than hypnotisni. A trap door, like any other door, has its limitations; it opens inwards or out- wards; and while it is easy to fall down through it, I am told it is more difficult to fdll up. But hypnotism is a perfect instance of that unfair use of the in- finite. or unknown of which we have’ spoken. For, as nobody knows much about hypnotism, anybody can be made to fall upstairs or downstairs, or float up to the ceiling, or fly through the air; and the impaling of the Wesleyan min- ister on the spike of his own church spire becomes the work of a moment. I am glad a firm stand was taken on the subject of Chinamen. The incessant and reckless propagation of wicked Chinamen to do the dirty work of Euro- peans in their sénsational novels has been one of the most servile and anti- social forms of the empioyment of Chi- nese labor. But I am giad to say that it has been to some extent stopped by the spirited action of an American writer, Earl Derr Biggers, who has cre- ated a good Chinaman, who is also &- very credible and convincing Chinaman, and made him the policeman instead of the criminal, Tm are the principles with which the Detection Club is trying, in a very quiet way, to influence the detec- tive type of fiction. It is in a very quiet way, and it has no connection with some similar associations proclaimed in the advertisements of particular pub- lishers; these may be quite legitimate methods of publicity, but they are merely methods of publicity; the club I speak of works altogether in private though not without some motives of public spirit. It is small enough to be more or less a meeting of friends; though it con- tains men whose names are sufficiently widely known: Austin Freeman, the cre- ator of Dr. Thorndyke, who has perhaps come nearest to occupying the empty throne of Sherlock Holmes; E. C. Bent- ley, who wrote what is generally re- garded as the best modern English mys- tery story, in England called “Trent’s Last Case,” but originally published in America, I think, under another title, something like “The Woman in Black”; Miss Dorothy Sayers, who sustains about the best level, in my opinion, of lively and intelligent writing in this style. There are others who have gained fame in departments different from this: A really fine novelist like Miss Clemence Dane or a really fine sociologist like G. D. H. Cole. There are other popular writers of my own generation, like Edgar Jepson, and many promising represent- atives of the rising generation, like An- thony Berkeley. I do not fancy that the club would have fitted in very well with a colossal cosmospolitan publicity, like that of Edgar Wallace. I say so not so much because he was a best seller as because he was a mass-producer. We have all " enjoyed his ingenious plots, but there was inevitably ‘something in his type of plotting that recalls our shyness in the presence of the omnipresent Chinaman of the “League of the Scarlet Scorpion.” He was a huge furnace and factory of fiction, imposing by its scale, but not suited to this particular purpose. It would be like going with one’s family and friends on a motor tour and finding oneself escorted by all the cars out of the factories of Mr. Ford. It would always raise the question of whether Mr. Ford belonged to the club or the club belonged to Mr. Ford. Therefore, in our little group, the external fame or success is largely accidental and the friendship is the original fact. Perhaps the most characteristic thing that the Detection Club ever did was to publish a detective story, which was quite a good detective story, but the best things in which could not possibly be understood by anybody except the gang of crimindls that had produced it. It was called “The Floating Admiral,” and was written somewhat uproariously in the manner of one of those “paper games” in which each writer in turn continues a story of which he knows neither head nor tail. It turned out remarkably readable, but the joke of it will never be discov- ered by the ordinary reader; for the truth is that almost every chapter thus contributed by an amateur detective is a satire on the personal peculiarities of the last amateur detective. ‘This, it will be sternly said, is not the way to become a best seller. It is a matter of taste; but to my mind there is always a curious tingle of obscure excitement in the works of this kind which have morekenjoyable to write than to read. Famed Library science of printing has been a conserver of space in so far as libra concerned. As an example, back in of the famous Alexandrian Librgry, days a single printed volume replaces the two dozen books containing this work in long