Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 355
Oh, yes, and fingerprints. Don’t have any. Really we’re all tired of them. As a matter of fact I’m glad to notice that a good many of the best people are cutting them out. Inspector Higginbottom shakes his head and murmurs “gloves.” It seems that practically all people who are thinking of murder go round in gloves. I’ve noticed them on the street.
The same with footprints — though I am not so sure about them. The old footprints that Sherlock used to trace are, of course, clean out of date. But the new scheme of Sherlock’s scientific successor — you all know who it is I mean — the new scheme of blowing powder into a footprint of mud, filling it up with cement and then taking out a perfect overshoe; that’s still good stuff.
Now as to your detective himself — but no, I almost despair of trying to give advice. All I can say, and I speak for all of us, is mostly negative. Don’t, of course, make him long and thin; that’s dead; but, for Heaven’s sake, not fat. Don’t have him go without sleep, or go without food, often for three or four hours at a stretch. Keep him decently fed, and, for our sake, not for his, give him drinks, plenty and often. Do you remember how, under prohibition, all the sleuth hounds had to begin to drink tea? You remember how the great detective would sit and think things out, “stirring his tea”! I don’t believe you can do it. Take some whisky and, my! you’ll begin to think fast.
There’s one standard English crime writer, to whom I can never be sufficiently grateful, who makes a point, at every emergency in his story, of giving his characters a “stiff whisky and soda.” Inspector Higginbottom, as soon as he realizes that the body is that of Sir Charles, goes to the sideboard and pours out a “stiff whisky and soda” all round! That’s the stuff! I can read that all night.... And the criminals themselves get it even better. The moment they feel themselves in a corner — what’s that word we use? Oh, yes, “trapped” — they pour out a drink, a whole tumblerful of neat brandy. Then they don’t feel “trapped” at all. You can’t trap a man full of that.
Of course you would ask why just whisky and not champagne? It’s too expensive. There is, as everybody knows, one prince of mystery story tellers who never conducts a crime without giving us at least half an hour at Monte Carlo, with “frosted champagne cocktails” and a Rumanian princess to look at! But it feels extravagant, for anybody brought up in a plain home with just whisky.
And yet such is the contrariety of things here in this author — I mean the one with the whisky and soda (all my associated readers know exactly who it is I mean) so fine about the drinks and yet falling into another fault that always exasperates us — I mean filling his books with descriptions and scenery. He begins, practically always, with a “market town” — Hellborough, or some such place, where they talk broad something. We can stand for a street or two, but when it comes to the town hall, dating from Edward the Confessor, we pass. Scenery we don’t need at all, except to take it fast, like a tourist in a picture gallery. You see, those of us who have read crime stories for twenty or thirty years have got in our minds a collection of scenes like what they call the “sets” in a ten-twenty-thirty theatre. “Market town of Hellborough” — correct, we have it; “purlieus of Chicago” — right, here you are; “drawing-room of the rectory” — that’s it — or not, not that, that’s a “bar-room in Denver.” But anyway we’ve got all our “sets” and a collection of weather; it’s odd the junk we carry in our minds as an equipment for reading. However, that’s another topic.
And there’s this. As you get nearer the end of the story, don’t have them all chase one another round. I mean all the characters, bandits, detectives, etc., in a sort of grand climax. You know the kind of thing I mean — in and out of cellars, down rat holes, out through outhouses. Poor old Edgar Wallace — there, I hadn’t meant to mention names, but never mind — could never get away from this: the sleuth trapped by the bandit, thrown into a cellar, water turned on, reaches his throat, dives out through a sewer, runs round in front, nails up the door, bandit trapped, goes to the attic, detective follows, detective trapped, bandit on roof, leaps into an aeroplane, detective crawls through a fly-screen, leaps into another aeroplane — zoop! They’re both gone. We have to begin over again.
And here’s a point of importance for the conclusion itself. Don’t be afraid to hang the criminal at the end. Better lay the story, if you can, in a jurisdiction where they hang them, because, to us readers, the electric chair sounds too uncomfortable. But hanging is old and respectable, and if you like you can use such a phrase as “went to the scaffold” or “went to the gallows.” That’s as simple as Old Mother Hubbard. But I mean we want him hanged; don’t let him fall into the sea out of his aeroplane. It’s not good enough. Hold him tight by the pants, till you get him to the gallows. And don’t let your criminal get ill in prison, or get so badly wounded or so heavily poisoned that he never gets tried because he is “summoned to a higher court.” Honestly, you can’t get a higher criminal court than the State Court of Appeal. There isn’t one.
I’ll stop there. Other readers may have suggestions.
READER’S JUNK
IN WRITING ABOUT detective stories as above, I stated that, for me, it wasn’t necessary for the writer of such a story to put into his book a plan of the house that was the scene of the murder. I said that I carried in my head, from much reading of crime, a plan of the house already made, cut up into bedrooms, with a passage-way, and one “bath” (for everybody) and a shape like a sausage lying loose in one room and marked “body.” Sometimes the house was called “Wisteria Lodge” and sometimes “Arundel House” or No. 1 Jefferson Avenue. It would do for any of them.
I had no sooner written this than I realized that it was only one sample of the quantity of junk which any reader carries round in his mind, ready to use, like the “sets” of a repertory theatre. In fact everybody has picked up a whole lumber room of them — country houses (for murder); shooting-lodges (for mystery); castles, for use in the Middle Ages; and a collection of city sets, such as a “midnight restaurant,” an “Alhambra Grill,” an “obscure tobacconist’s,” a “den of vice,” a “purlieus” (or do you have to have two of them?), the “left side” of Paris, the West side of Chicago. Everybody knows them and keeps a collection of them. Most of them no doubt are a long way off reality.
A shooting-lodge, for instance — I’ve never seen one. What do you shoot in it? And why lodge? I always picture it made of cedar in the rough, set up end on, with a lot of gable corners. My shooting-lodge is really a compound made of a half-and-half mixture of Old Vienna and a Canadian lumber shanty. A den of vice! For that I use a lot of smoke, a guttering candle, with plenty of grease; that makes it “murky.” Or dear old Monte Carlo — I’ve never seen the place, but I have it there all ready for use like slipping in a lantern slide. There’s the Casino, come in. I built it when I was about ten years old and had never seen one; I can’t ever get it straight; it’s too much like a barn. They are playing “baccarat” in it, but I am afraid the baccarat table is too much like a barn supper (I was brought up in the country). All around Monte Carlo are a set of huge flowers that I keep — taken as names years ago and never seen — such as hibiscus and climbing rancenculus and flowering funeraria. No doubt you have a lot of them too. The effect is vague but gorgeous. The flowers and shrubs are used to bury the bungalows, because from my earliest recollection bungalows are always “buried in flowers.” My bungalows are a bum lot; they were copied originally from summer cottages on Lake Simcoe, and it’s hard to get them plastered and put “plinths” on them and cornices. No, they’re all wrong. I admit it.
But the point that I am groping toward is the inquiry as to the effect on literature, I mean on the appreciation of it, of this accumulation in the reader’s mind of a set of preconceptions, pictures and ready-made characters. It seems to me that it must act on the mind as hardening of the arteries does in the body. Presently nothing can get through. What’s the good of trying to tell a desert island story to a reader like you or me, who has owned a desert island for fifty years, yellow sand, a rivulet of pure water (that was a piece of luck) and a banyan tree, a form of bread and of which the “fibres” can be used to make fish lines.
It’s the same with the characters. We all have a stock of them ready for use like marionettes in a child’s theatre. For example a “benevolent old gentleman” — what a peach he seemed when we first read of him at twelve; what a nut now. You see no new benevolent old gentleman can get a chance with us; the minute the author names him we say “Right oh!” and substitute our own. Personally I always, in reading fiction, use my own benevolent old gentleman, my own family lawyer, my own curate, my own ship’s bosun and all the rest of them. I take them to each new book as people take their own food to a basket picnic.
If someone of a critical turn were to follow up this train of thought perhaps it might prove interesting — help to explain why interest flags in age, and why authors rise and fall. This much is certain. Whenever we can get away from preconceptions and stock pictures and take our fiction straight, as children do, it stands out with marvellous clarity and interest. I find an instance of this in the great vogue that the “Western Picture” enjoys all over the world. You will see an English audience (right out of the purlieus, or of the bungalows) sit enthralled as they watch the sheriff’s posse chase through the sage brush, see the desperado shoot up the saloon, and the real train fall through the actual trestle bridge.
The reason is that it’s all new, or still new enough. It hasn’t — not yet, or only partly — been all raked over like a dust heap and used again and again. That’s why, for the present, even for English audiences, it beats things out of English history ten ways. Don’t show me Queen Elizabeth getting into her barge off the stone steps beside the Thames. Bless me, I’ve seen the woman, and the same steps, since I was eight. And the courtiers, in the queer little puffed pants, why, I keep a set of them given me by Alexander Dumas in the middle eighties.... But the sheriff’s daughter, shooting Lobscouse, the Indian brave, with her father’s derringer (18 inches long)! — ah! There’s a girl for you!
Of course it can’t last. Already the new generation are gathering up their sets of scenery and their characters on strings. The Sheriff of Cheyenne, Wyoming, will soon be as dead flat as Henry of Navarre, and Lobscouse the Indian will fall back into second class with Queen Victoria, and Mollie of the Ranges (who shot him) will just look like Charlotte Corday or Marie Antoinette.
And then, of course, something else will turn up, to catch again the colours of the morning. If it didn’t, our literature would fall asleep, like the dead classics of China; would turn into “sacred books,” read in the dust of pyramids. But that time is not yet. As a civilization we are still only just past sunrise.
LITTLE STORIES FOR GOOD LUCK
THREE ON EACH
WHEN I WAS teaching at Upper Canada College fifty years ago, we took corporal punishment for granted. I myself had been “licked” at school and as a master I “licked” the boys without any compunction or afterthought about it. As a matter of fact corporal punishment, which is after all the same thing as physical torture, can only exist on those terms — that nobody thinks about it.
But even in those days there were some people who found the idea revolting and couldn’t bear to think of it. One of my college friends felt like this. So I said to him one day, “Fred, if you’ll come down to Upper Canada College this afternoon at three o’clock when school ends, I’ll be certain to have two or three boys who have to take a caning and you’ll see how simple and normal it is.”
But that day something seemed wrong in class. Not a boy “did” anything all day — just quiet ordinary behaviour and lessons all first rate.
It looked at three o’clock as if I would have no one to “lick.” But I didn’t want to disappoint my friend. So I said to the “worst” boy in the class, one of those fine young toughs who are really the best:
“Urquhart, you’ll stay in after three when the class goes.”
“Please, sir,” he protested, “what’s that for?”
“That’ll be all, Urquhart,” I answered, “don’t be impertinent.”
At that moment my friend arrived and I said to him very gravely: “I’m afraid I have a delinquent boy to deal with here before I can go. But if you’ll just sit down I won’t be a minute.”
“Please, sir,” clamoured Urquhart as I got out the cane, “what’s this for?”
“Urquhart,” I said, “please don’t make things worse by lying about it. You’re to have three on each, or I must report you to the principal for refusing to take a caning.”
That was enough for a decent boy like Urquhart. To refuse to take a caning and go and blab to the principal was pretty low business for a boy of his spirit.
He stood up and took his three on each, like the little man he was.
I would have felt pretty mean about it if it hadn’t been that after he had had his licking Urquhart said:
“I want to apologize, sir, for trying to lie out of it. Only I didn’t see how you knew about it.”
But I never knew what Urquhart had done: except that, as all schoolmasters know, a high-spirited boy has always done something.
NOTHING MISSING
I WAS SAYING the other day how absent-minded professors are and how simple-minded — I mean in the good sense of the term. They have no notion of the narrow exactness of business.
A case in point is that of my friend Cartwright-Trope who was a lecturer in the University of Chicago at a time when I was a graduate student there, many years ago.
Trope and his wife were going away for the summer and were moving their furniture out of their flat into storage. Trope came to me and asked me if I would do him a favour and I said, certainly.
“We’re going away by this evening’s train,” he said, “but the furniture men don’t come till tomorrow afternoon. I was wondering if you would mind” — here he produced a long paper with a list of things written on it— “it’s really a lot to ask — but would you, perhaps, go over to the flat and just sit around while they move the things out — it’s only two loads — and just check them off on this list and then you could post the list to me, and I’ll know it’s all right.”
I said it was a mere nothing, and that I’d do it gladly and Trope went away much relieved.
Next day I didn’t bother to go near his flat. I just took a blue pencil and made a little mark against each item on the list, some slanting one way and some another, and some a little light and some a little heavy. Then I posted the paper to Trope.
A month later in Toronto we met at an afternoon tea and Trope told of how kind I’d been. “Every item!” he said, “every item, and there must have been a hundred — and every single one checked off!”
I’ve often wondered since what happened.
THINKING OF TOMORROW
I WAS GRIEVED to see by the papers a few weeks ago that the world has lost that kindly Irish poet, W. B. Yeats. I knew him a little bit, years ago. Unlike most literary celebrities, he looked the part. His face would assume at times a look of far-away abstraction, such as only a poet would wear.
One time when “Billy” Yeats was in Montreal lecturing, I gave a supper party for him at the University Club — a large round table filled with admiring women, and silent husbands. There came a lull in the conversation during which Yeats’ face assumed the far-away look of which I speak. The ladies gazed at him in rapt admiration. At last one said:
“What are you thinking about, Mr. Yeats?”
“Thinking of tomorrow,” he answered in his rich musical voice, “and wondering!”
You could feel the ripple of sympathetic interest among the ladies: the word “tomorrow” carries such infinite meaning.
“Wondering what?” someone ventured in a half whisper.
“Wondering,” said Yeats, “if there is breakfast on the Boston train.”
After all, poets have to feed.
INFORMATION WHILE YOU DRINK
AMONG THE FIGURES of the vanished past whom I regret, is the old-time bartender — I mean, the bartender at his best.
There he stood behind his bar, mopping up the foam, urbane, polite, neat in his wicker sleeves and with his hair flattened with oil — courteous, obliging, tireless.
He never drank.
“Have one on me, Billy?”
“Thanks, I’ll take a cigar.”
But his especial forte was information — the latest horse race, the coming ball game, the time of all the “shows” and the “records” of the sprinters and scullers — in short, all any “sport” could need.
Beyond that he handed out general information, and beyond that conversation to order as desired.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson informs us somewhere that Eskimos always tell you what they think you want to hear; they answer a question according to what they think you’d like.
Well, the bartenders were like that.
“Fine day! Billy.”
“It sure is.”
“Looks like rain, eh, Billy?”
“It certainly does.”
But I am thinking here of a specially illustrative case of bartenders’ information that happened within my own experience. It was in Montreal away back in 1902 or 1901 — at any rate in the year, whichever it was, when Émile Zola died.
