Men of mystery—stories

JEFFERSON CHASE

Why it is that statesmen and bank presidents often find nocturnal relaxation in reading murder stories

Night after night, men of girth and stature in the world of high finance and politics snuggle into bed, snap off the center lights, adjust the shade of the reading lamp and indulge in the vice of secret reading. What is it that they read? Is it the Bible? No, it is not the Bible which enthralls the head of the B. 0. and R. Railway system. Is it a good treatise on the economies of consumption in a day of mass production which entices the managing director of the Atlantic and Mississippi Steel Company? When the President of the United States stretches liis curvilinear form on the White House bedstead does he invariably study the political treatises of Machiavelli, Lenin, and Mussolini or does he thumb over the copies of The Federalist? Does the big Big Banker always retire with reports on the currency systems of Brazil and Australia? Does the head of the mammoth department store peruse the analyses of sales resistance in a depression prepared for him by his bright young vice-president? No. By evidence, by admission and by sheer human nature, we cannot avoid the conclusion that a large proportion of the great men of America open a book which in chapter one, contains the ominous remark, by the butler: ''Begging your Lordship's pardon, but Sir Miles don't answer."

It is a fact that mystery stories provide a large portion of the lighter reading of some of the most important leaders of our political and industrial civilization. Among the great men of our time who have admitted to a hankering for a corpse in the first chapter have been Ling George V of Great Britain and three American presidents—the late Woodrow V ilson finding relief from the World War and the Treaty of Versailles, Calvin Coolidge forgetting that he was a myth, and Herbert Hoover seeking consolation from the perplexities of depression and the intricacies of party politics, in the mysterious thumb-prints on the dress-shirt of the murdered financier.

English statesmen like Stanley Baldwin and David Lloyd George have a taste for literary mysteries. The late Dwight Morrow used to pit his uncanny intuition for human motives against the wits of the mystery-mongers. Lawyers like Clarence Darrow take a recess from court procedure, ecclesiastics like Bishop Hobson give the rubric a rest, writers of the stature of Sinclair Lewis and Bernard Shaw lay aside their typewriters, in order to delve into the engrossing question of why Sir Jocelyn Meriweather was awake and dressed and on the moor at three o'clock in the morning on the night when Otto Orpington was strangled with a bath-towel.

Where the lowbrow works his way, chuckling laboriously, through the comic strips; where the middle-brow takes a crack at the cross-word puzzles in the evening papers; and where the highbrows follow the fads of the moment, the men of action yawn, stretch themselves at full length, with or without a tall amber glass at their elbow, and plunge into The Mystery of the Faceless Phantom or dally with Death at the Country-Club.

Why? For exactly the same reason that anyone else reads a mystery story. They try to see whether the author has been smart enough to outwit them, while playing fair with the reader all the way through; and— heretical thought—they wish to escape from the world of adverse majorities, loss of revenue, falling stock market quotations and general muddle. The detective story opens before them a charming, logical, clear-cut world, in which human intelligence brings order out of human chaos, in which human actions and reactions are interrelated and coordinated to a degree which leads inexorably from bafflement to enlightenment. Here is a world where crime is punished, puzzles are solved, and intelligence is rewarded. Here also is a world in which love is not the only motive for human antics, and thus it is a world remarkably similar to the world of business and politics.

And so, year in and year out, hundreds of men and women all over the country are sitting at typewriters, or with sharpened pencils, working out the details of air-tight plots in which, with the necessary corpse, all the essential clues are served up to the reader like garniture on a leg of lamb. The murderer among the twenty week-end guests at Oastley Manor, the great countryhouse of Lord Derringdo, is selected, equipped with alibis and motives. The inconspicuous chap from Scotland Yard, the erudite journalist, physician, priest or plain man of common sense, is groomed for the role of detective, and the large irregular stain of blood slowly spreads over the Chippendale table and trickles down upon the priceless Persian carpet in Lady Angletree's boudoir.

New and fantastic modes of murder are devised, clues are erased, false trails are laid, and it is not until we learn from the lips of Morton, the valet of the murdered financier, that young Captain Daingerfield had been observed wandering on the terrace at one in the morning, do we begin to suspect that Morton himself is either the murderer or is trying to shield someone, for Captain Daingerfield, frank, open-faced and friendly, could not possibly have done it. Was he not alone in the gun-room at the precise moment when the crime was committed, as attested by the chimes of the village church? And yet there is a bit of a mystery about the Captain. No one seems to know who his people are. However, by the twenty-fifth and last chapter, we discover that Captain Daingerfield is one of the ablest of the secret agents of the War Office, and that the dead banker was trying to sell the plans of the latest high-speed mystery night-bomber to a foreign power, and it turns out that the banker either committed suicide—an unfair trick—or was killed by his own valet who had just discovered that it was the banker who had seduced his—the valet's—daughter Violet, seven years before.

Such is the formula mystery story, the easiest and pleasantest type of mystery story to set before the big men who read them. The other, and more difficult type, which is less frequently attempted, is the tale which combines this puzzle element as described above with the sense of impending danger and implacable, pursuing evil. Lord Walsingham has received an anonymous warning that at precisely midnight he will be murdered. Lord Walsingham has a "past," and there are many men who might desire to destroy him, so he takes care to surround himself with an army of private detectives who guard every entrance to his great townhouse, so that not even a mouse could enter unobserved. Midnight has almost arrived, when something happens to the lights. There is a moment of darkness, matches are lighted, the servants bring candles. Then the lights go on again and Lord Walsingham begins to laugh. He keeps on laughing, louder and more shrilly. His arms and legs twitch uncontrollably. His face turns purple and then black, and he pitches forward stone-dead, his face still set in a ghastly grin. It hardly requires the services of experts to announce that he has been slain through the action of some rare vegetable poison, which does not yield to analysis. The outraged authorities set vigorously to work. His Lordship was no doubt a bad egg, but law and order must be preserved, y' know.

The suspense is horrible. The police are acting blind-fold, when old Theophilus Throgmorton, curator of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum, comes forward with the opinion that the poison used is identical with the old Egyptian formula called "nepht," with which the Pharaohs used to remove inconvenient courtiers and ambitious generals.

Now the trail he sets leads the authorities through opium joints in Limehouse, to human derelicts on the Thames embankment, to a defaulting clerk in the Bank of England, on and on to the strange pitched battle outside the little white cottage in Devonshire, where a regiment of chemical troops use poison gas to destroy the bold gang of "Reds" who have been plotting to turn Merrie England into a Soviet and what-not.

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Whichever formula is used, it is essential that the story follow a definite pattern. The murderer may or may not be known, but his motive or his identity must be shrouded from the reader. The corpse must be produced at an early stage in the proceedings, or else the reader feels cheated. Suspicion must be distributed as widely as possible, and it is considered most effective if the real murderer is suspected with the others at the outset and is then cleared of all blame at the preliminary investigation. The police may or may not blunder, but blunders must be made. Evidence may be concealed, or Sir Ronald may lie like a gentleman, because at the time he swears he was out admiring the rhododendrons by moonlight, he was actually in the same room with Lady L-, quite innocently of course, but who would believe it? Finally, one keen, clear, practical intelligence must get to work on the subject and, by process of induction and deduction, discover that the murder was committed by a left-handed woman of medium stature, or that the agents of a foreign power had been blackmailing the victim in order to obtain possession of a secret treaty.

Good mystery stories juggle with the fate of nations, involve Presidents, cabinet ministers, great financiers, grand dukes, secret treaties, war plans, revolutionaries, and super-criminals. One of the most adroit of our popular mystery writers, Mr. Anthony Abbott, has followed this formula—the same which Poe used—in the construction of such books as The Murder of the Clergyman's Mistress. But the greatest mystery writer of our era, E. Phillips Oppenheim, has followed the grand ducal and world politics slant throughout his more than a hundred books, and has thereby provided the historian of the future with a perfectly reliable guide to the international prejudices of the Englishspeaking world during the last thirty years. The prodigious and meteoric success of the late Edgar Wallace was due primarily to unremitting industry and ease in contriving plausible super-criminals and excellent plots, but even he not infrequently lifted his mysteries above the low plane of everyday life among common people.

S. S. Van Dine's remarkable mystery stories are carried by a carefully elaborated background, which combines the more exotic of the sciences with the more diabolical of human motives. J. S. Fletcher's detective yarns excel in the atmosphere of impending doom which he is able to convey to his readers, where the mystery tales of "Diplomat" provide a Washington background of worldpolitics in the Oppenheim tradition, with a gay, official touch. Both Agatha Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart combine shrewd and painstaking characterization with neatly constructed situations of horror and bewilderment. Throughout, however, murder is the great crime.

These men of mystery stories live in a world of mystery and daring. They have seen the Bottomleys and the Hatrys, the frauds, the adventurers, the charlatans, the Napoleons of business and finance, rise and fall, come and go. They have seen a Caucasian peasant usurp the power of the Tsars, and a blacksmith's son rule Italy. They know that nothing which can be written about life is as strange as life itself, and they find in mystery stories, for all their romance and impossible compactness, the nearest approach to their own incredible lives.