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14
INTRODUCTION

tached, and his emblem is the green research-case, filled with miniature microscopes and scientific implements. Max Carrados has the distinction of being blind; Old Ebbie wears a rabbit-skin waistcoat; Lord Peter Wimsey (if I may refer to him without immodesty) indulges in the buying of incunabula and has a pretty taste in wines and haberdashery. By a final twist of the tradition, which brings the wheel full circle, there is a strong modern tendency to produce detectives remarkable for their ordinariness; they may be well-bred walking gentlemen, like A. A. Milne’s Anthony Gillingham, or journalists, like Gaston Leroux’s Rouletabille, or they may even be policemen, like Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector French, or the heroes of Mr. A. J. Rees’s sound and well-planned stories.[1]

There have also been a few women detectives,[2] but on the whole, they have not been very successful. In order to justify their choice of sex, they are obliged to be so irritatingly intuitive as to destroy that quiet enjoyment of the logical which we look for in our detective reading. Or else they are active and courageous, and insist on walking into physical danger and hampering the men engaged on the job. Marriage, also, looms too large in their view of life; which is not surprising, for they are all young and beautiful. Why these charming creatures should be able to tackle abstruse problems at the age of twenty-one or thereabouts, while the male detectives are usually content to wait till their thirties or forties before setting up as experts, it is hard to say. Where do they pick up their worldly knowledge? Not from personal experience, for they are always immaculate as the driven snow. Presumably it is all intuition.

Better use has been made of women in books where the detecting is strictly amateur—done, that is, by members of the family or house-party themselves, and not by a private consultant. Evelyn Humblethorne[3] is a detective of this kind, and so is Joan Cowper, in The Brooklyn Murders.[4] But the really brilliant woman detective has yet to be created.[5]

While on this subject, we must not forget the curious and interesting development of detective fiction which has produced the Adventures of Sexton Blake, and other allied cycles. This is the Holmes tradition, adapted for the reading of the board-school boy and crossed with the Buffalo Bill adventure type. The books are written by a syndicate of authors, each one of whom uses a set of

  1. ↑ A. J. Rees: The Shrieking Pit; The Hand in the Dark; (with J. R. Watson) The Hampstead Mystery; The Mystery of the Downs, etc. Messrs. Rees and Watson write of police affairs with the accuracy born of inside knowledge, but commendably avoid the dullness which is apt to result from a too-faithful description of correct official procedure.
  2. ↑ e.g. Anna Katherine Green: The Golden Slipper; Baroness Orczy: Lady Molly of Scotland Yard; G, R. Sims: Dorcas Dene; Valentine: The Adjusters; Richard Marsh: Judith Lee; Arthur B. Reeve: Constance Dunlop; etc.
  3. ↑ Lord Gorell: In the Night.
  4. ↑ G, D. H. & M. Cole.
  5. ↑ Wilkie Collins—who was curiously fascinated by the “strong-minded” woman— made two attempts at the woman detective in No Name and The Law and the Lady. The spirit of the time was, however, too powerful to allow these attempts to be altogether successful.
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