DETECTIVE NOVELS.

 According to Miss Marjorie Nicolson, associate professor of English at Smith College, who contributes an article to the "'Atlantic Monthly" on detective fiction, the most omnivorous readers of detective stories both in England and America are college professors, who when they meet to discuss educational matters, turn the subject round to their favorite reading. She declares that some distinguished professors of philosophy in American universities boasts of possessing extensive collections of detective stories. She insists that the reason why intellectual readers have turned to this class of fiction is that they have revolted from the modern psychological novel. "We have revolted," she writes, "from an excessive subjectivity to welcome objectivity; from long drawn-out dissections of emotion to straightforward appeal to intellect; from reiterated emphasis upon men and women as victims either of circumstances or of their glands, to a suggestion that men and women may consciously plot and consciously plan; from formlessness to form; from the sophomoric to the mature, most of all, from a smart and easy pessimism which interprets men and the universe in terms of unmoral purposelessness, to a rebelief in a universe governed by cause and effect. All this we find in the detective story."

“'Throughout England and America to-day," she continues, "you will find the same thing to be true. Lending libraries in college towns are hard put to it to keep up the supply; university librarians are forced to lay in a private stock 'for the faculty only.' Let but two or three academics gather together, and the inevitable conversation ensues. At the meetings of learned societies this year it will not be the new physics or the new Astronomy, or the new morality, or the new psychology, that your specialists in these fields will be debating, but of footprints and thumb marks, of the possibility of poisoning by means of candles, of the chances of opening a locked door with a pair of tweezers and a piece of string !" 

“The pure detective story to-day is never — and what a relief — a love story. If the love element is introduced at all— the connoisseur prefers that it should be omitted — it must be distinctly subordinated, for to make your hero and heroine sympathetic enough to permit their love story, is at once to free them from the list of possible suspects. And in the pure detective story as in that grimmest of legal theories, every man and woman is guilty until he has proved himself innocent. Our detective story has returned to-day to a welcome insistence that love between the sexes is not the only possible motif for fiction; jealousy, hatred, greed, anger, loyalty, friendship, parental affection—all these are our themes. No longer is the well-spring of man's conduct to be found only in tho instinct of sex." 

"And indeed this change of emphasis is producing a curious effect upon the treatment of women in the detective novel. Man characters are always in the majority, the detective story, indeed, primarily a man's novel. Many women dislike it heartily, or at best accept it as a device to while away hours on a train. And while we do all honor to three or four women who have written surpassingly good detective stories of the purest type, we must grant candidly that the great bulk of our detective stories to-day are being written by men — again, perhaps because of their escape from a school of fiction which is becomingly too largely feminised. It is noticeable also that the woman characters in these contemporary stories are no longer inevitably sympathetic. More than once the victim is a woman; and even here, where our authors might become sentimental, we notice their impassivity. For in the great majority of cases the victim in a murder story is one who richly deserved to die. One or two authors have experimented with the woman detective, but for the most part with little success. Apart from minor characters, the two important roles in the detective story for women are victim and villainess. With the changing standards of sentimentality there is no longer any assurance that a woman character is not the murderer. There was a time when we could dismiss women with a wave of the hand; but all of us think of at least four contemporary heroines, three of them young and beautiful, who in the end turn out to be cold and calculating murderers. Whatever may be the sentimental reaction of modern judges and juries in our courts of law, in the high tribunal of the detective story women are no longer sacred."

Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 - 1954), Saturday 4 May 1929, page 4