One hesitates to worry the mystery these days with either praise or reappraisal. It is as often and as agonizingly re-examined as, say, our foreign policy, or as a small boy’s ears.
Everybody is doing it.
Its fanciers do it Its foes do it. Its own craftsmen, even its hacks do it, but the only galling meddlers really, to my mind, are those lugubrious friends of the family who come to it as to a wake, mouthing pious laments for the good old days.
Those were the days, as I understand them, when a detective couldn’t see an ankle for counting the buttons that led up to it, when science was something he could put in his eye, or at least to his eye, and thereby have his logic confirmed, never confounded, when all policemen were gentlemen, polite however stupid, all scoundrels villainous from the nursery to the noose.
Well, the old days, good or bad, are gone. The mourners say the detective story has gone with them. Perhaps it has. I don’t think so. I have a feeling that so long as a contemplative man walks the city streets, the country roads, musing on the ways and wonders of his fellows, seeking the predicate in that which was unpredictable but happened nonetheless, so long as there is surprise in love, joy in discovery, fear in the unknown, honor in courage and humor in the ironic, so long will the detective story discover man for man.
No, I don’t really think the detective story has run out on us. Rather, I think we may sometimes—readers and writers—run out on it, naturally, properly, healthily, and only to return with the heart absence is presumed to make grow fonder.
No doubt the detective story has changed. As science has opened up so much that is new in so many endeavors, how reactionary to expect the story of detection or crime to stand still! Is the thriller less thrilling for the dagger’s being in the mind instead of the body? Is the discovery of how it got there less a detective story in one instance than in the other?
The greatest change, however, is in the company a detective story must keep these days: where once it dominated crime fiction, today it must stand muster with numerous and distinguished fellow thrillers. Just how diverse a company they are, this collection of stories by members of The Mystery Writers of America may illustrate.
We chose as theme “Contrasts in Murder,” seeking tales almost tender—in a deadly way, of course—and we have interspersed them with the hard, smashing lore of violent crime. Some are detective stories in what the purists would call the classic tradition.
I cannot be held solely responsible for these Murders: accessories-before-the-fact Jean Potts and Jerome Barry of MWA and accessory-after-the-fact Burroughs Mitchell of Charles Scribner’s Sons are quite as deeply implicated. Scarcely less so, for having so willingly aided and abetted us, is Catherine Barth, MWA executive secretary.
And none of us would be in this predicament at all were it not for the generous connivance of more than a hundred MWA authors, twenty-three of whom now come forth.
—Dorothy Salisbury Davis
Piermont, New York
April 14,1958