Today Philip MacDonald is almost forgotten, but he and his detective Anthony Gethryn were celebrated figures in the years between the Wars. The Rasp, the first crime story he published under his own name, was an immediate success, and The Noose (he had a taste for single word titles) was the first Crime Club choice in 1930. The Evening Standard bought the serial rights, MacDonald’s sales quadrupled, and within a year the Crime Club had 200,000 members. MacDonald continued to produce successful books under several pseudonyms and a number of them were experimental in one way or another. Three of the best were Rynox, Murder Gone Mad, and X v Rex, the last of which was written under the pseudonym of Martin Porlock. The construction of these books is sometimes careless, but they all contain extremely ingenious ideas, and the desire to do something new is always apparent. Then, in the early ’thirties, MacDonald was invited to Hollywood by RKO Pictures, became a scriptwriter, and wrote little more except for the screen, although he produced in 1952 a collection of short stories called Fingers of Fear, some of which show his characteristic cleverness. As a crime novelist, however, MacDonald’s career really ended in the ’thirties. It is not surprising that he has been forgotten.
The exuberant and indefatigable American crime buff Dilys Winn recently discovered MacDonald living in the Motion Picture Retirement Home near Malibu, and talked to him about his career. She found him inclined to deprecate the books that had made his name: ‘They’re all a bit dated, aren’t they?’ The Noose he thought ‘awfully old-fashioned’, and he would probably have said the same about The Maze. Dilys Winn found conversation difficult, and from her account of the interview one gets the impression that the time when MacDonald wrote crime stories was for him an ocean and a different life away. He belonged even in appearance to that different life. For the interview he sported an ascot, carried a silver-handled cane, and had his hair precisely parted and slicked down with pomade.
He said firmly that he was born in 1900, but this would mean that his first book Ambrotox and Limping Dick, written in collaboration with his father, was published when he was twenty years old. He thought that his best book was Patrol, which is not a crime story, rated his short stories higher than his novels, and expressed his aversion to literary company. ‘Two writers in one room is too many.’
I think it must be acknowledged that The Maze, like its author, is a period piece, but it is one that must give pleasure to any reader who likes to solve a puzzle and to pit his own wits against those of the author’s detective. And there is another reason why I hope that Philip MacDonald will be pleased to see the book republished. The most wistful thing he said in the course of the interview was that the Home’s library did not contain ‘one tiny word, not one, of mine.’ At least The Maze can now find its proper place upon the shelves.
JULIAN SYMONS
1980
I HAVE given this book the subtitle of ‘An Exercise in Detection’.
I have used the word ‘exercise’ deliberately; I mean it to be an exercise not only upon my part, but upon the part of any reader who may have the tenacity to get through it. In Parts Two, Three and Four of the book—the actual evidence of the witnesses upon the first time of their calling and the summing up of the Coroner—is contained all the information upon which Gethryn has to work. In other words, you, the reader, and he, the detective, are upon an equal footing. You know just as much as and no more than he knows. He knows just as much as and no more than you. He finds out: could you have found out without his help?
I should like to emphasise that although, for the sake of ‘balance’ and of avoiding tediousness, part of the evidence (that is, the re-examination and re-examination of the witnesses) has been omitted, none of this evidence was anything except repetitive. Gethryn, in fact, was not supplied with this repetitive evidence, as is shown by the note to him from Lucas. What Gethryn had is what you have. From what you have he made his deductions.
I have frequently been annoyed—as any reader of the analytical type of detective fiction must have been annoyed—by books in which the detective holds an unfair advantage over the reader in that he has opportunities which the reader cannot share. He may, for instance, in Chapter II ‘dash up to London and spend two hours there.’ And then the reader, not having been allowed to see what the detective did during those two hours in London, is at a disadvantage. Again, in Chapter XVII, the detective may suddenly, in a foully offhand and altogether offensive manner, ‘pick some small object off the ground’ which he puts in his waistcoat pocket and doesn’t say anything more about until Chapter XXIII, when it forms the basis upon which his whole case is founded. Again the reader has been subjected to the most dastardly unfair play!
In this book I have striven to be absolutely fair to the reader. There is nothing—nothing at all—for the detective that the reader has not had. More, the reader has had his information in exactly the same form as the detective—that is, the verbatim report of evidence and question.
This is a fair story. If you get the right answer—not merely a ‘guessed’ answer, but an answer for which you are prepared to put forward reasons—then you are as good at this job as A. R. Gethryn. If you don’t, you are not. In either case I think you should be satisfied—unless, of course, you find the whole business too impossibly easy, in which case you ought—if you are not indeed already one—to become a really big noise at Scotland Yard.
PHILIP MACDONALD
1932
LETTER DATED 14th JULY, 193– FROM ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER SIR EGBERT LUCAS, C.I.D., TO LIEUT.-COL. ANTHONY RUTHVEN GETHRYN
SCOTLAND YARD,
14th July, 193–
MY DEAR GETHRYN,
It is with a good deal of diffidence that I approach you, remembering our conversation before you left England for this holiday. You said that upon no account were you going to ‘inaugurate, contemplate or elucidate crime or any minor or major misdemeanours!’ You also said, I believe, that you were not going to read any English newspapers while you were out of England. Be that as it may, I am worrying you. I would like you to understand, however, that the fact that I am worrying you is due only partly to my own inclination. Charters himself, Pike and Jordan—and, this morning, even Bunter—have all brought pressure to bear upon me. I suggested to Charters that if he wanted to worry you he should do it himself. But he wasn’t having any. And so, as usual, I’m left to do the dirty work. It may be very pleasant to be the First Commissioner of Police. It’s certainly very pleasant to be an ordinary Police Constable. But who would be an Assistant Commissioner?
I feel that I’m taking an unconscionably long time to get down to brass tacks. That’s probably due to the fact that I’m dictating this letter and also to the fact that I’m nervous about its reception when I remember my promise to you of a few weeks back. However, here goes:
Since you’ve been away there has happened—near Kensington Gore of all unlikely places!—a case which is the most extraordinary within my fairly long experience and also, I am told, within the thirty-five years’ experience