My dear Peters:

What is the future of the detective story? That is a question which should interest you as much as me. To quote the only reviewer of detective fiction whom we who write it can take seriously (because the only one who takes us seriously): ‘As to technique, it appears that there are two directions in which the intelligent novelist is at present trying to develop…: he may make experiments with the telling of his plot, tell it backwards, or sideways, or in bits; or he may try to develop character and atmosphere.’ This, I think, is exactly the case; and having, as a convinced experimentalist, already tried the former alternative,[1] I am here making my attempt at the latter.

In my own opinion it is towards this latter that the best of the new detective-writing energies are being directed. I personally am convinced that the days of the old crime puzzle pure and simple, relying entirely upon plot and without any added attractions of character, style, or even humour, are, if not numbered, at any rate in the hands of the auditors; and that the detective story is already in process of developing into the novel with a detective or a crime interest, holding its reader less by mathematical than by psychological ties. The puzzle element will no doubt remain, but it will become a puzzle of character rather than a puzzle of time, place, motive, and opportunity. The question will be, not, ‘Whokilled the old man in the bathroom?’ but, ‘What on earth induced X, of all people, to kill the old man in the bathroom?’ I do not mean that the reader need know until after a considerable part of the story has been told that it was X at all (the interest of pure detection will always hold its own); but books will no longer end with the usual bald exposition of the detective in the last chapter. The detective’s solution will only be the prelude to a change of interest; we shall want to know exactly what remarkable combination of circumstances did bring X, of all people, to the decision that nothing short of murder would meet the case. In a word, the detective story must become more sophisticated. There is a complication of emotion, drama, psychology, and adventure behind the most ordinary murder in real life, the possibilities of which for fictional purposes the conventional detective story misses completely.

That by clever technique the reader’s interest can be retained after the murderer’s identity has been disclosed is proved by The Singing Bonecollection of stories by Dr Austin Freeman, in which we see first of all the criminal actually at work and follow the detective’s subsequent activities with that knowledge before us; and by Mr A E W Mason’s At the Villa Rose,in which Celia’s inside story of the murder, after its solution by Hanaud and the arrest of Wethermill, occupies no less than a third of the book and yet holds us just as firmly as did the actual process of detection.

Strictly speaking perhaps the book now before you is not a detective story at all. That is, it is the story of a murder rather than the story of the detection of a murder. But so long as the murderer’s identity is not disclosed (at least, not purposely), this only means that the reader-detective has to use his own wits a little more and does not get all his thinking done for him.

Anyhow, detective story or not, I offer the book to you by way of some small acknowledgement of all you have done for me.

AB

1 Circularly, in The Poisoned Chocolates Case.