If you’ve been watching this blog constantly over the past few days, you will have noticed that one book has received two separate reviews, that being Knife in the Dark, by G. D. H. and Margaret Cole. David Vineyard left the following comment after the first of these, that being the one that I wrote. Of note, of course, is that he doesn’t spend all of his time talking about the Coles.     — Steve


   While I never read any of the Mrs. Warrender stories I did read several of the Supt. Wilson ones, and eventually had to grant the chief criticism of the Coles put forward by Haycraft and others, that the Coles put together a fair puzzle but they were awfully dull. I’ll check out some of the Warrender tales and see if that still holds. Someone once said of Daniel DeFoe that he “employed dullness brilliantly” but that’s hardly a virtue in a detective story.

   The Coles were hardly alone in the category of being dull reads. I enjoy many of Freeman Wills Crofts’ books and those of John Rhode, but though both could get some action going, both could be pretty dull too. There’s a certain charm the first time you encounter one of Crofts’ timetables, but it grows thin fairly soon, and some of Rhode’s later Dr. Priestley books could be used to cure insomnia.

DENNIS WHEATLEY

   One of the problems with the classical tec tale is it sometimes got so involved with the puzzle and the rules it forgot the rule about entertaining.

   The absurd length that this was taken to was in the Dennis Wheatley books, which presented you with characters, motive, even clues like cigarette butts, but you had to play the detective. Alas they pointed out the problem that murder wasn’t much fun without a good detective and things like a plot and real story. They might be fun for a party game but they weren’t much to curl up before the fire with.

   One of the reasons we still read Christie, Marsh, Sayers, and Allingham when so many others have gone the way of the dodo is that they weren’t afraid of a little melodrama, adventure, intrigue, romance, and action. Philip MacDonald was often criticized at the time for introducing too much suspense and action into his Anthony Gethryn novels, but as a result many of them are better reads today than clever puzzlers like Anthony Berkley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case where everyone talks and talks and nothing much happens.

S. S. VAN DINE

   Towards the end of the classical era even S.S. Van Dine felt the need for Philo Vance to get involved in a car chase and running gun fight (The Kidnap Murder Case). I never understood why dullness was supposed to be a literary virtue in the detective novel.

   That said, R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke stories and novels contain few thrills, but the structure of the plot, the joys of watching Thorndyke’s careful and methodical investigation, and the reconstruction of the crime by Thorndyke at the end hold the reader as well as any shocker or thriller.

   But then Freeman was, in Chandler’s words, “the best dull writer,” and Thorndyke a character who, while largely forgotten today, deserves to sit very near the top with Holmes, Father Brown, Poirot, and Maigret. In the right hands even dullness can be a virtue, though not one to be imitated by would be writers.