Rita's school life

Detective Stories偵探故事

The detective tale in its ideal form has a regular pattern, like Greek tragedy. A dead body is found, doubtless murdered; the police fumble the investigation. Accompanied by his admiring friend and biographer, the gifted amateur appears and solves the case by reasoning backward from clues to criminal. The unfolding must observe certain restrictions—no supernatural agencies or poison unknown to science, no physical impossibilities or even improbabilities; and since the main interest consists in the process of discoveries amid the confusion of facts and human purposes, there must be neither psychological delving nor a full-blown love affair.

In the first postwar period the taste for "mysteries" was considered infra dig; readers would apologize for their addiction. Some famous literary critics went out of their way to castigate them as lowbrow. This was contrary to fact; detective stories were written by and for highbrows. In that Golden Age of the genre, the English women writers led the field: Sayers, Marsh, Allingham, Heyer, and Christie were unsurpassed in invention and technique, affording the pleasure of literary art—plotting, wit, and narrative skill, in the service of invention, which must be ever fresh. President Wilson and Bertrand Russell were voracious consumers and more recently, J. L. Borges and Pablo Neruda.

Later observers psychologized and said that reading the tales purged the lust for mayhem. This showed complete ignorance, since the genre does not dwell on the physical act of murder and the corpse is usually disposed in the first few pages. What the stories satisfied was fascination with method—an aspect of SCIENTISM—coupled with the pleasure of seeing crime put down; in other words, Reason and Right.