Time to Be in Earnest Read Online Free PDF Page B

Gothic horror which is yet firmly rooted in physical reality. Above all, of course, and more than any other writer, he established the tradition of the great detective, the omniscient amateur whose personal, sometimes bizarre eccentricity is contrasted with the rationality of his methods and who provides for the reader the comforting reassurance that, despite our apparent powerlessness, we yet inhabit an intelligible universe.
    Then there are the more modern American writers, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, both fine novelists, who have had an influencebeyond the genre. Chandler was born in America but brought up in England and was much influenced by Hammett. Most aficionados of detective fiction would agree with Chandler that his books should be read and judged not as escapist literature, but as works of art. I would only add that I don’t see why escapist literature shouldn’t also be a work of art. Chandler would undoubtedly have deplored many of the detective stories written by women. He wrote that the English might not be the best writers in the world, but they were the best dull writers, and he inveighed against what he saw as the artificiality of the detective story, proclaiming his wish to give murder back to the people who committed it. This, of course, is to reiterate an old criticism, but in his case, I think, with little force. Chandler’s lone romantic hero striding down the mean streets, imperfect but still superior to the viciousness and savagery which surrounds him, is in his way as much a figure of fantasy as is Lord Peter Wimsey, Roderick Alleyn or Albert Campion. Women too, in the American hard-boiled novel, seem often devoid of reality. They are either patient little helpmeets tapping away at the typewriter in the office, or seductive villainesses, as irrelevant to the hero’s integrity as they are to his life.
    Then there are the novelists of espionage, the best of those surely being men: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and John le Carré, with his fascination with treachery and betrayal and his marvellously persuasive evocation of the sad bureaucracy of spying. No woman has written about international espionage with quite the same authority.
    But I don’t think it is rewarding to argue over which sex is pre-eminent in the genre. And perhaps the balance is shifting. Too many male crime writers, obsessed with violence and with the search for what they, a uniquely privileged generation, see as the gritty reality which they have never personally experienced, are portraying a world as nihilistic as it is bloody. Perhaps it is to the women we must look for psychological subtlety and the exploration of moral choice, which for me are at the heart of even the most grittily realistic of crime fiction.
    Tom and Mary Norman arrive tomorrow—they say shortly after five—to stay until Saturday. Tom is one of my oldest friends and one of the few who knew Connor. They met during the war when both went to Cambridge for some preliminary entrance examination before taking their B.A. courses. They were due to have a practical examination the next day and Tom suggested that they should go down to the laboratories to see if the incubators were working. If they were, at a time whenenergy had to be carefully conserved, it would be possible to draw up a list of probable questions. The incubators
were
working and Tom gave Connor a list of subjects for last-minute revision. Connor told himself, “This man is a genius and I will stay close to him all my life,” which, with a few difficult years’ intermission during the worst of Connor’s illness and when they were serving in different theatres of war, he effectively did.
    I can’t remember my first meeting with Connor, but I know that it was when I was working at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge. I was assistant box office manager, assistant stage manager, and indeed assistant to anyone who needed a willing if inexperienced factotum. I had finally said goodbye to my