A Crime Is a Crime

BLOOD ON THE DINING-ROOM FLOOR (80 pp.)--Gertrude Stein--Banyan Press ($6).

There had been a murder, or had there? She did not die at once, not dying as in death. She lived five days, five days dying, each day a dying but not dying as in death.

Whodunit? Author Gertrude Stein never comes right out and says, and a second reading of her posthumous Blood on the Dining-Room Floor doesn't help much. This curious fling at mystery-story writing by the late expatriate mumbo-jumboist never even admits that a murder is a murder is a murder. And there is no detective in the story to clear things up.

Blood is set in the foothill country of the French Alps, where Author Stein and Companion Alice B. Toklas used to spend their summers. Many characters wander into the book and as casually wander out, never to be heard from again. Did the victim fall from a window on to the stone courtyard--or was she pushed? Perhaps "the horticulturist" knows. He sounds like a possible clue: "And now to tell and to tell very well very very well how the horticulturist family lived to tell everything, and they live in spite of everything, they live to tell everything."

But they do not tell in the book, and neither does anyone else. Most whodunit fans will find Blood on the Dining-Room Floor an elaborate leg pull. It is also an expensive one. Beautifully printed from handset type, handsomely bound, the initial edition (626 copies) sells for $6. As an example of the bookmaker's art, it is a delight to hand & eye. But anyone who buys it merely for the plot deserves to have his nose rubbed in three of Author Stein's sentences: "Out of what. Out of nothing. Silly that you are."

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