Books: Murder Market

Of approximately 2,000 works of fiction published each year in the U. S., some 200 are detective stories. These murder stories make up a sizable fraction of the U. S. publishing output, although one that is seldom discussed in literary journals. To old-line publishers detective stories are a small, steady, moderately profitable side line. Their sales do not rise very high or fall very low. Many a worthy novel of serious literary import sells less than 1,000 copies. But few detective stories sell less than 2,000. Many a second-rate work of general literary interest reaches the best seller class, with sales in tens and even hundreds of thousands, but only the work of the most popular mystery-story writers—Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Savers, Agatha Christie, S. S. Van Dine, a few others—sells more than 10,000 copies.

Of the 48 mysteries that Crime Club publishes each year, for example, a third sell between 2,000 and 3,500 copies; a third between 4,000 and 6,000; a third more than 7,000, with an occasional headliner running well above that figure. Al though the erudite Dorothy Sayers is now one of the most popular of mystery waiters, her successful Murder Must Advertise sold only 9,000 copies, her audience growing slowly with each book until her most recent, Busman’s Honeymoon, reached a high of 20,000. The works of S. S. Van Dine, the most consistent best-seller among detective-story writers, average 30,000 copies apiece, a record in their field, but small in comparison with the totals of even second-rate best-sellers in romance or biography. But since 65% of detective stories go to circulating libraries, publishers calculate that one selling 5,000 copies entangles some 20,000 readers in the fly paper of its plot before its binding comes loose, its pages fall out, and new works have put it out of date.

To literary moralists detective stories constitute a strange and perplexing body of writing—books in which murder, the most appalling of human crimes, becomes an excuse for the solving of puzzles, the most innocuous of human time-wasters; stories of death without grief, of tragedy without elevation. Good and bad, crude and skillful, socially harmless or morally irresponsible, detective stories come and go at the average rate of four a week.

Product. But spring is a big season.

This month addicts had 27 new titles to choose from. Next month they have 25 more. In this month’s mysteries almost 60 corpses turned up in the total of 6,500 pages of lurid prose. These unfortunates were killed by means of a deadly reducing remedy, by a tomahawk, a poisoned rapier, with shotguns, revolvers, overdoses of morphine and bare hands. They died violently in offices, on vacant lots, in a Connecticut inn, a houseboat on the Nile, in a Long Island mansion, a Hollywood study, a broadcasting studio, English villages, aboard yachts and under the dryer of a beauty parlor.

Like all detective stories, if taken in the mass, last month’s painted a harrowing picture of human affairs. Among the entire hot-blooded population of the U. S.

there are about 10,000 actual murders a year, 32% of them the result of quarrels, another 25% coming unmysteriously from domestic triangles. But in only 318 mystery stories published by the leading firm of Crime Club, doodling statisticians counted 1,300 corpses.

Addicts. Who reads these tales of grim confusion is a greater mystery than most of those their authors set out to solve.

The taste of Presidents Hoover and Wilson and of other prominent people for detective stories has been so publicized, said Detective-Story Writer Carolyn Wells, that now when bystanders see a man buying a detective story they wonder, “What great captain of industry is this?”

But prominent addicts account for only a few of the 750,000 mysteries the U. S. public absorbs each year.

Crop. Of this month’s crop, two turned out to be tedious by detective-story standards. In Who Killed Oliver Cromwell?

Leonard Gribble told an unbelievable story of the murder of a self-made Englishman at a fancy-dress ball. In Midnight and Percy Jones Vincent Starrett told the story of the shooting of a Chicago concert singer and the solution of the crime by Riley Blackwood, a drama critic and annoying amateur detective.

But if this month showed few that were definitely bad, it also had few that addicts could call first-rate. In the category of acceptable they put items like Laurence Dwight Smith’s Death Is Thy Neighbor, Nard Jones’s The Case of the Hanging Lady, George Bagby’s Murder on the Nose, G. D. H. & Margaret Cole’s The Missing Aunt, Whitman Chambers’ Dog Eat Dog, Carolyn Wells’s The Missing Link, William Gore’s The Mystery of the Painted Nude, Ellery Queen’s The Devil to Pay.

Of last month’s 27, four stood out as best bets:

Dance of Death—Helen McCloy—Morrow ($2). The story of a body, uncannily resembling a celebrated debutante, found in a snowdrift, solved by a psychiatrist whose medical and psychological analyses make more sense than scientific details usually do in detective fiction.

Death Wears a White Gardenia—Zelda Popkin—Lippincott ($2). The death by strangulation of the credit manager of a big department store, solved by plodding store detectives to the humiliation of kibitzing professional sleuths.

The Annulet of Gilt—Phoebe Atwood Taylor—Norton ($2). Wild week end on Cape Cod, involving murder in a rented house, foreign intrigue and mysterious servants, solved by means of the long memory of the salty oldtimer, Asey Mayo.

Death on the Nile—Agatha Christie—Dodd, Mead ($2). The murder of an English heiress in Egypt, followed by two more baffling killings, solved by Agatha Christie’s famed Hercule Poirot in a story that is readable, implausible, but contains the most genuinely surprising solution of the month.