becoming unconscious. Not so on the film stage. There we are confronted with frail humanity fighting its way through situations of the most distracting agony that can possibly be conceived, and we are asked to believe that in the end the hero (or, more often, heroine) emerges, with mens sana in corpore sano, to live happily ever afterwards. It is admittedly doubtful whether tragedy on the film can be expected to have the same purging effect on the mind of the audience as tragedy on the stage, for film plays, in default of words, have developed along the line of presenting as vividly as possible in concrete detail every tragic situation in the story, so that nothing is left to the imagination. (Worse, they rely for their interest, not on the unity of a singly developed and cumulative tragedy, but on the power of the plot to admit the concatenation of the maximum number of such agony moments.' 6) And it is possible, and, let us hope, probable, that the pernicious effect of witnessing such scenes is mitigated by a fact that, however deplorable from the point of view of dramatic art, is some consolation under the circumstances, namely, that the imagination of the audience is not really deeply stirred, and that consequently the impressions received are little less superficial and ephemeral than those caused by the casual perusal of our sensational pictorial Press. At the same time, considering the ever-increasing part played by the cinematograph in the recreative life of the people, it would be deplorable if cinema drama developed solely on these lines. It should be possible to portray wordless drama with some approach to the artistic reticence of great tragedy; indeed, it has been proved possible on several occasions on the stage proper before now, and I cannot see why the taste of the people should not be educated up to its appreciation. A stricter economy of pictorial tragic incident would achieve a deeper stirring of the imagination, would change the nature of the cinema's appeal, and remove it from the base ministering to the love of undiluted sensationalism to the higher function of purging the emotions by stirring them to their depths. It may be that I am asking for the impossible, and that already a cinema tradition has set popular taste irrevocably. If that is so, we must transfer our hopes to the ultimate realisation of vocal drama on the cinema, and trust that, when science has made this new form possible, it will escape the toils of conscienceless commercialism, and assert and justify a claim to recognition as a serious contributor to the evolution of dramatic art. STANLEY Rowland. • 'Thrills,' I believe, is the technical term. THE ART OF THE DETECTIVE STORY THE status in the world of letters of that type of fiction which finds its principal motive in the unravelment of crimes or similar intricate mysteries presents certain anomalies. By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story-to adopt the unprepossessing name by which this class of fiction is now universally known-is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office-boys, factory-girls and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste. That such works are produced by such writers for such readers is an undeniable truth; but in mere badness of quality the detective story holds no monopoly. By similar writers and for similar readers there are produced love stories, romances, and even historical tales of no better quality. But there is this difference: that, whereas the place in literature of the love story or the romance has been determined by the consideration of the masterpieces of each type, the detective story appears to have been judged by its failures. The status of the whole class has been fixed by an estimate formed from inferior samples. What is the explanation of this discrepancy? Why is it that, whereas a bad love story or romance is condemned merely on its merits as a defective specimen of a respectable class, a detective story is apt to be condemned without trial in virtue of some sort of assumed original sin? The assumption as to the class of reader is manifestly untrue. There is no type of fiction that is more universally popular than the detective story. It is a familiar fact that many famous men have found in this kind of reading their favourite recreation, and that it is consumed with pleasure, and even with enthusiasm, by many learned and intellectual men, not infrequently in preference to any other form of fiction. This being the case, I again ask for an explanation of the contempt in which the whole genus of detective fiction is held by the professedly literary. Clearly, a form of literature which arouses the enthusiasm of men of intellect and culture can be affected by no inherently base quality. It cannot be foolish, and is unlikely to be immoral. As a matter of fact, it is neither. The explanation is probably to be found in the great proportion of failures; in the tendency of the tyro and the amateur perversely to adopt this difficult and intricate form for their 'prentice efforts; in the crude literary technique often associated with otherwise satisfactory productions; and perhaps in the falling off in quality of the work of regular novelists when they experiment in this department of fiction, to which they may be adapted neither by temperament nor by training. Thus critical judgment has been formed, not on what the detective story can be and should be, but on what it usually is. For it must be admitted that the average quality is distressingly low; indeed, a detective story which fully develops the distinctive qualities proper to its genus, and is, in addition, satisfactory in diction, in background treatment, in characterisation and in general literary workmanship, is probably the rarest of all forms of fiction. The rarity of good detective fiction is to be explained by a fact which appears to be little recognised either by critics or by authors; the fact, namely, that a completely executed detective story is a very difficult and highly technical work, a work demanding in its creator the union of qualities which, if not mutually antagonistic, are at least seldom met with united in a single individual. On the one hand, it is a work of imagination, demanding the creative, artistic faculty; on the other, it is a work of ratiocination, demanding the power of logical analysis and subtle and acute reasoning; and, added to these inherent qualities, there must be a somewhat extensive outfit of special knowledge. Evidence alike of the difficulty of the work and the failure to realise it is furnished by those occasional experiments of novelists of the orthodox kind which have been referred to, experiments which commonly fail by reason of a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the work and the qualities that it should possess. A widely prevailing error is that a detective story needs to be highly sensational. It tends to be confused with the mere crime story, in which the incidents-tragic, horrible, even repulsive-form the actual theme, and the quality aimed at is horror-crude and pungent sensationalism. Here the writer's object is to make the reader's flesh creep; and since that reader has probably, by a course of similar reading, acquired a somewhat extreme degree of obtuseness, the violence of the means has to be progressively increased in proportion to the insensitiveness of the subject. The sportsman in the juvenile verse sings : I shoot the hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum and that, in effect, is the position of the purveyor of gross sensationalism. His purpose is, at all costs, to penetrate his reader's mental epidermis, to the density of which he must needs adjust the weight and velocity of his literary projectile. Now no serious author will complain of the critic's antipathy to mere sensationalism. It is a quality that is attainable by the least gifted writer and acceptable to the least critical reader; and, unlike the higher qualities of literature, which beget in the reader an increased receptiveness and more subtle appreciation, it creates, as do drugs and stimulants, a tolerance which has to be met by an increase of the dose. The entertainments of the cinema have to be conducted on a scale of continually increasing sensationalism. The wonders that thrilled at first become commonplace, and must be reinforced by marvels yet more astonishing. Incident must be piled on incident, climax on climax, until any kind of construction becomes impossible. So, too, in literature. In the newspaper serial of the conventional type, each instalment of a couple of thousand words, or less, must wind up with a thrilling climax, blandly ignored at the opening of the next instalment; while that ne plus ultra of wild sensationalism, the film novel, in its extreme form is no more than a string of astonishing incidents, unconnected by any intelligible scheme, each incident an independent thrill,' unexplained, unprepared for, devoid alike of antecedents and consequences. Some productions of the latter type are put forth in the guise of detective stories, with which they apparently tend to be confused by some critics. They are then characterised by the presentation of a crime-often in impossible circumstances which are never accounted for-followed by a vast amount of rushing to and fro of detectives or unofficial investigators in motor cars, aeroplanes or motor boats, with a liberal display of revolvers or automatic pistols and a succession of hair-raising adventures. If any conclusion is reached, it is quite unconvincing, and the interest of the story to its appropriate reader is in the incidental matter, and not in the plot. But the application of the term ' detective story' to works of this kind is misleading, for in the essential qualities of the type of fiction properly so designated they are entirely deficient. Let us now consider what those qualities are. The distinctive quality of a detective story, in which it differs from all other types of fiction, is that the satisfaction that it offers to the reader is primarily an intellectual satisfaction. This is not to say that it need be deficient in the other qualities appertaining to good fiction: in grace of diction, in humour, in interesting characterisation, in picturesqueness of setting or in emotional presentation. On the contrary, it should possess all these qualities. It should be an interesting story, well and vivaciously told. VOL. XCV-No. 567 3 A But whereas in other fiction these are the primary, paramount qualities, in detective fiction they are secondary and subordinate to the intellectual interest, to which they must be, if necessary, sacrificed. The entertainment that the connoisseur looks for is an exhibition of mental gymnastics in which he is invited to take part; and the excellence of the entertainment must be judged by the completeness with which it satisfies the expectations of the type of reader to whom it is addressed. Thus, assuming that good detective fiction must be good fiction in general terms, we may dismiss those qualities which it should possess in common with all other works of imagination and give our attention to those qualities in which it differs from them and which give to it its special character. I have said that the satisfaction which it is designed to yield to the reader is primarily intellectual; and we may now consider in somewhat more detail the exact nature of the satisfaction demanded and the way in which it can best be supplied. And first we may ask, What are the characteristics of the representative reader? To what kind of person is a carefully constructed detective story especially addressed? We have seen that detective fiction has a wide popularity. The general reader, however, is apt to be uncritical. He reads impartially the bad and the good, with no very clear perception of the difference, at least in the technical construction. The real connoisseurs, who avowedly prefer this type of fiction to all others, and who read it with close and critical attention, are to be found among men of the definitely intellectual class: theologians, scholars, lawyers, and to a less extent, perhaps, doctors and men of science. Judging by the letters which I have received from time to time, the enthusiast par excellence is the clergyman of a studious and scholarly habit. Now the theologian, the scholar and the lawyer have a common characteristic: they are all men of a subtle type of mind. They find a pleasure in intricate arguments, in dialectical contests, in which the matter to be proved is usually of less consideration than the method of proving it. The pleasure is yielded by the argument itself and tends to be proportionate to the intricacy of the proof. The disputant enjoys the mental exercise, just as a muscular man enjoys particular kinds of physical exertion. But the satisfaction yielded by an argument is dependent upon a strict conformity with logical methods, upon freedom from fallacies of reasoning and especially upon freedom from any ambiguities as to the data. By schoolboys, street-corner debaters and other persons who are ignorant of the principles of discussion, debates are commonly conducted by means of what we may call 'argument by asser |