Arts: Blackjack Fiction

When Does the Goose Creep Into the Flesh? It was nearly half past three in the morning. Somewhere a clock tolled the hour—twelve long strokes. Down the shadow-shrouded stairway moved a skeleton, clad only in a pair of violet pajamas. Softly, sibilantly, the spectre sped. An errant mouse cried out in terror, his hoarse shriek breaking the tense stillness. At the foot of the stairs a single, shining shaft of moonshine drenched the leg of a human being, severed at the knee, lying in a pool of gore. Arsenic Hatpin, gentleman capitalist, inserted a single eyeglass deftly into one of his eyes.

The Inveterate Reader of mystery stories has not necessarily the instinct of either a crook or a sleuth; it is, as a rule, immaterial to him whether or not the final chapter brings with it the apprehension of the miscreant who effected the theft or murder. He is, on the other hand, a devotee of crime. He likes to see a good skull or a good safe well cracked. He enjoys the spinal titillation of secret and malign forces lurking in the darker chapters, ready to spring upon the superhero, who loses no opportunity of making himself their target.

Few Inveterates care particularly whether the mystery is ever adequately solved. It rarely is. It has served its purpose in making it possible for a number of conspicuously intelligent folk to perform conspicuously idiotic but wholly enthralling feats through 250 pages or more. One’s enjoyment of the recent tale of murder and psychoanalysis, from the pen of Mr. Ben Hecht, is neither augmented nor impaired by the eventual disentanglement of its complexities. It is the quaint, initial assassination itself, the atmosphere of brooding horror, the haunted eyes of De Medici, that fling the reader of The Florentine Dagger (TIME, Sept. 3) into a bewildered Nirvana of goose flesh and insomnia. It is the mental gymnastics of Sherlock Holmes or the chemical fumblings of Craig Kennedy that delight, rather than their eventual (and predictable) triumphs.

The appeal of the detective story is the same as that of any other novel, except that the elements of conflict and struggle, always present, are here emphasized with much of the delicacy of a steam riveter. For the subtle play of intelligence on intelligence; the struggle of a finite humanity against the merciless irony of nature, agreeably substituted the somewhat less ethereal play of nitroglycerine on steel—the writhing of infinite intellect in mortal combat with invincible guile. J. A. T.