Here, in little, is all the best, at least according to Howard Haycraft, and may I say? He would know. Who, you might say, he? Well, I'll tell you. Haycraft was a publisher of the old and tweedy kind; a very good thing indeed, and, more importantly and like nearly all of his kind back in the day, a great enthusiast. Haycraft's enthusiasm was for murder. To my knowledge, he never committed a crime, just read about them. (But then we wouldn't know, I suspect unless he told us, now would we? Considering his study of the subject, he should have been good at it.) Anyway, what he did do, study the mystery story seriously. To quote the good gentleman's obituary in the New York Times, from November 13, 1991, and thereby a great bookseller who would know better than I:
"Mr. Haycraft indulged a passion for detective fiction that resulted in "Murder for Pleasure," published in 1941 and still in print. "At time of publication it was the most important single work of fiction-mystery scholarship ever produced," Otto Penzler, the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, said yesterday.
"It remains the most insightful, perceptive and fair-minded book ever written on the subject."
Now, there. I know him primarily however as an anthologist. Besides this very good little book, he selected and edited, "The Art of the Mystery Story" (1946), "The Haycraft-Queen Definitive Library of Detective Crime Mystery Fiction" (1951), and a big, two volume doozy he did with John Beecroft for the Book Club, called, A Treasury of Great Mysteries. This little volume was the first of Haycraft's I'd read, who remembers when originally. That fat double-decker I picked up a year or two ago from a discard box at the bookstore, I think it was, and happily spent I can't tell you now how many happy evenings with one or the other ugly old volume, propped up at the dinner table or on my belly in bed, unwilling to put it down until, say Mary Roberts Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton could escape that locked room.
Here we have a smaller, in fact a much less baggy book, almost a final refinement of much of Haycraft's best thinking when it comes to what makes a mystery story not just good, but great. (I can't think of a better collection, of it's kind and time.) Now what that means for the reader perhaps not much moved by the theory of such things, is 14 stories, from quite diverse hands, none of which would strike the new reader as either very bloody or always quite correct, by our more socially advanced standards. Nope. What is here in abundance in the kind of cleverness; in plotting, yes, but also in quick, sharp character, wit, atmosphere and yes, moral, that marks all this kind of thing as being now either classic or cliche, depending on the reader's sympathy with old things.
I like these, most of 'em, for their charm. That was the supreme value in Haycraft's day, even if realism and even plausibility occasionally suffered. Who cares? Each of these is a perfect little puzzle, and each is worked with a great craftsmanship I'm sure, but the point is in the fun of it it all, the sometimes slightly gruesome good time to be had from crime and a quick resolution. In other words, just because these mystery writers, and their editor particularly took all of this quite seriously, does not suggest that the reader was then meant to. The point back then was entertainment, and there is here, as might have been said back in the day, in spades.
"Mr. Haycraft indulged a passion for detective fiction that resulted in "Murder for Pleasure," published in 1941 and still in print. "At time of publication it was the most important single work of fiction-mystery scholarship ever produced," Otto Penzler, the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, said yesterday.
"It remains the most insightful, perceptive and fair-minded book ever written on the subject."
Now, there. I know him primarily however as an anthologist. Besides this very good little book, he selected and edited, "The Art of the Mystery Story" (1946), "The Haycraft-Queen Definitive Library of Detective Crime Mystery Fiction" (1951), and a big, two volume doozy he did with John Beecroft for the Book Club, called, A Treasury of Great Mysteries. This little volume was the first of Haycraft's I'd read, who remembers when originally. That fat double-decker I picked up a year or two ago from a discard box at the bookstore, I think it was, and happily spent I can't tell you now how many happy evenings with one or the other ugly old volume, propped up at the dinner table or on my belly in bed, unwilling to put it down until, say Mary Roberts Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton could escape that locked room.
Here we have a smaller, in fact a much less baggy book, almost a final refinement of much of Haycraft's best thinking when it comes to what makes a mystery story not just good, but great. (I can't think of a better collection, of it's kind and time.) Now what that means for the reader perhaps not much moved by the theory of such things, is 14 stories, from quite diverse hands, none of which would strike the new reader as either very bloody or always quite correct, by our more socially advanced standards. Nope. What is here in abundance in the kind of cleverness; in plotting, yes, but also in quick, sharp character, wit, atmosphere and yes, moral, that marks all this kind of thing as being now either classic or cliche, depending on the reader's sympathy with old things.
I like these, most of 'em, for their charm. That was the supreme value in Haycraft's day, even if realism and even plausibility occasionally suffered. Who cares? Each of these is a perfect little puzzle, and each is worked with a great craftsmanship I'm sure, but the point is in the fun of it it all, the sometimes slightly gruesome good time to be had from crime and a quick resolution. In other words, just because these mystery writers, and their editor particularly took all of this quite seriously, does not suggest that the reader was then meant to. The point back then was entertainment, and there is here, as might have been said back in the day, in spades.
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