In sorting through Dad’s stuff, we discovered a couple items he had written for a college magazine he helped produce at King’s College in Newcastle, titled The Modern Languages Magazine. This article, titled Crime for the Connoisseur, was published in Vol. 1. No. 1 in Dec. 1946, along with other authors’ works in English, Spanish, French, and German. If I reflexively switch to American spelling, please forgive me; I will try to retain the original, but sometimes my fingers are faster than my brain.
It seems almost incredible that for the last fifty years a vast horde of novelists has been scrubbing away at the detective story, racking its brains in trying to think up new themes, and especially new methods of killing the victim. The trouble is, that hardly any of them since Conan Doyle have realised that a murder is not at all necessary; that it is, in fact, distinctly out of date. After all, the whole of our modern society depends on people doing what is polite, and convenient to others. And it is not at all convenient to cause a major disruption of other people’s lives by entangling them in a murder. Not is it polite to drag the police away from their normal business to investigate murders, and then to allow some unauthorized stranger to dismiss them as blunderers, and solve the case himself.
It is really high time that the murder-manglers woke up to this: murder is quite outdated. What is more, as a theme it is beginning to look sorely bedraggled.
Then there is the problem of the detective. From the professional to the inconspicuous ordinary citizen, from the police to the armchair variety, all have been tried. Somebody has even written a story in which the detective is the murderer; but that required another detective to catch him. But not one of these plot-mincers ever thought of a detective story in which the crime was never discovered, was never even mentioned, and which there was no detective at all. Yes, it exists – in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado about Nothing”.
You are thunderstruck! But I see, you have been brought up in the modern tradition; for the normal reader of detective stories never finds out the criminal by any means other than guesswork. And he does not try – he knows quite well that he is expected not to solve the problem; for the solution will be there, sure enough, in the last chapter. Shakespeare credits you with more intelligence: for in his story it is the public – yes, you and I – who are the detectives. Beware! – he exerts all his genius to lead you astray with a crime that never existed; and he leaves only one clue. Mind you, that one clue is not one of these paltry modern details – stopped clocks, or remains of Turkish cigarettes in the ash-tray – it really gapes at you.
The general plot is that Claudio, a demobbed army officer, is engaged to be married next day to Hero, the local city governor’s daughter. But along comes Don John – a really low type – and takes Claudio at midnight to watch Hero billing and cooing with some other man at her bedroom window. So next morning in church, Claudio breaks off the engagement, and tells Hero why: she shows a decided tendency to swoon (Note this – ‘Tis important!) Meanwhile the stooge hired by Don John to do the midnight wooing act got drunk on his wages, and in telling one of his pals that at the window was not Hero, but her maid, whom he was calling “Hero”, he was overheard by the local Peelers, who arrested him forthwith. And so Don John made himself scarce, and Claudio proceeded to wed Hero. Another troubled romance ended happily.
But you and I, being the intelligent readers whom Shakespeare’s ghost has so long awaited, will immediately ask: if Hero’s maid was love-making at Hero’s bedroom window, where, pray, was Hero all the while? Doing her knitting – at midnight, when she was expected to be in bed? Chatting with one of the maids? – none of the maids came forward next day to admit any conversation with her. Well, then, I regret to say that we must presume she was loitering with a man. You noticed that, when accused in the church next morning, she fainted. This was first taken as proof of her guilt in the affair at the window, later as proof of her innocence. Both were wrong: she fainted because she realised that whoever was at her window – her maid, as it turned out – knew quite well that she was not in bed at that time. A deadly fear chilled her to the marrow: whoever it was might choose to reveal this fact, then the truth would emerge, that she had been dilly-dallying with….
Yes, inspector, I think I know my man: do you?
But I should hate to interfere with your enjoyment of the play by telling you before you read it: that would be most impolite, and not at all convenient.
