THE SIXTY-FIFTH PAGE

Although my heart has ever lain with American fiction, I found recent work in the crime writing field a poor helper in my researches. Late in the last century when American mysteries followed British and Continental models it seemed to have meaning: an eyeball for an eyeball; an incisor for an incisor. There is a certain, pleasing fastidious in criminal procedures in the Victorian period. Perhaps the hideous impersonal character of the Great War and the global skirmishes that followed it changed forever the calculation, the contemplation of getting back at ‘em. With the arrival of the hard-boiled school, motivation in crime stories became random, pointless, joyless, without purpose. This odd notion of crime for crime’s sake even infected the plots of the beloved Ms. Drew and the Hardy boys, who were not empowered by Carolyn Keene and Franklin X. Dixon to do much more than find lost treasures and hand over villains to the authorities for public prosecution.

Nancy and the boys deserved guns.

None of this should be assumed to run counter to my stand against capital punishment. If you are injured, you have every right to injure your injurer Don’t hire anyone else to do it for you--especially from the amorphous mass of society. The game of life and death’s not to be played that way.