Crisis in Mysteries

Historian-Educator Jacques Barzun can be a mean critter when aroused, as he has been of late by contemporary prose (a "mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax"). Higher Learning (he could find only "an immense amount of Lower Learning" in the U.S.), and the Ph.D. racket (TIME, Nov. 25, 1957). In American Scholar Barzun castigates his latest victim: detective stories, which, he says, have fallen on evil days, turning increasingly into "novels of haze and daze."

The first crime of the detective stories is that they can no longer hold even such a willing victim as Jacques Barzun in any suspense. Writers nowadays try to create suspense by merely delaying the story with digressions, or by causing the characters to become confused: " 'He had stopped understanding things over an hour ago.' The idea is that the reader, also bewildered, will feel breathlessly eager to recover his wits and will call the anxiety suspense. Mind is explicitly excluded." Moreover, the new detective fiction is badly put together ("The prevailing impression is of writing by a gifted child with a poor education"). And the authors are so busy treating love affairs "sensitively," making character studies, examining race prejudice, family tensions and other neuroses, that they all but leave out the crime. One example of a book with too many extras: the bestselling Anatomy of a Murder ("We could do without the tippling lawyer's aide, the sentimental love affair at the end, and perhaps some of the medical evidence").

A few recent tales pass Critic Barzun's muster:

THE LONG FAREWELL, by Michael Innes (Dodd, Mead; $2.95), "combines seriousness and foolery in the right proportions and supplies true detection as well."

MURDER ON TRIAL, by Michael Underwood (Washburn; $2.95), represents "detection slight but genuine."

AND FOUR TO GO, by Rex Stout (Viking; $2.95), is "compact and full of meat . . . The use of the mind is. as always, pre-eminent."

MURDER OF A WIFE, by Henry Kuttner (Pocket Books; 35-c-), presents "the ratiocination of a San Francisco psychiatrist . . . Sober and credible."

CATCH AS CATCH CAN, by Frances and Richard Lockridge (Lippincott; $2.75), "is a short and attractive tale [of ] persecution and chase."

But for the most part, Barzun insists, the mystery story is in trouble. His explanation: the detective story is a "parasite" of the novel, and when the serious novel itself "concentrates on the whacky," as it does today, and "starts from the conviction that society and all who dwell in it are disagreeable and worthless," the detective story is simply thrown off its feed. Good detective fiction needs "a world that we accept because it is conventional . . . Why pursue the criminal if the victim and society are not worth protecting?"

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