Bloodhounds

by a lead to his master's chair leg, and forced to lie outside the circle.

Shirley-Ann was intrigued that Rupert could appear so indifferent to the chaos he and his dog had just inflicted. He sat between Polly and Milo in a relaxed attitude with legs crossed and his left hand cupping his chin. It was a face without much flesh, dominated by a beak of a nose and dark, deepset, alert eyes overlapped by the front edge of the black beret.

Polly said, 'We were having quite a fruitful discussion about the predominance of the puzzle in the classic detective novel.'

'Tiresome, isn't it?' Rupert took up the challenge at once. 'Totally unconnected with the real world. All those eccentric detectives-snobbish lords and little old ladies and Belgian refugees looking for unconsidered clues. Absolute codswallop. In the whole history of crime in this country, real crime, I defy you to name one murder that was solved by a private detective. You can't.' His owlish eyes scanned the circle. 'You can't.'

'That doesn't put me off,' Milo gamely answered. 'I don't want my reading too close to real life.'

'Or real death,' said Jessica.

'Exactly.' But Milo had missed the point.

Rupert laughed and displayed even more gum. He was quite a ruin, but extremely watchable. 'Fairy stories for grownups.'

'Why not?' said Milo. 'I like a little magic, even if it turns out to have been a trick.'

Shirley-Ann chimed in, 'That goes for me, too.'

Rupert gave her a pained look. 'Another one suffering from arrested development. Hell's teeth, I'm seriously outnumbered now.'

Polly sounded a lighter note. 'When some of us heard P. D. James at the Pump Room a few years ago, she said she must have had the mind of a crime writer even as a child, because when she first heard the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty, her thought was 'Did he fall, or was he pushed?''

Even Rupert smiled, and then went straight on to the offensive again. 'And they all live happily ever after?' he pressed them. 'Is that what you want from your reading?'

'A sense of order restored, anyway,' said Shirley-Ann. 'Is that the same thing?'

Milo remarked, 'I like the loose ends tidied up.'

'So that you can sleep easy, knowing that all's right with the world,' Rupert summed up with heavy irony. 'Do you people ever read the crime statistics? Do you know what the clearup rate is? Has any of you ever had your house burgled?'

'Yes.'

Heads turned abruptly, for it was Sid who had spoken. He was so inconspicuous that even a single word was quite a bombshell. Having let it fall, he lowered his eyes again, as if the flat cap resting on his knees had become more interesting than anything else in the room.

Shirley-Ann was intrigued to know what Sid was doing in a discussion group like this if he was so reluctant to join in. He plainly didn't wish to say any more. He avoided eye contact. His posture, his whole behavior, seemed to ask the others to ignore him, and that was what she herself had done up to now. She prided herself on being observant, so Sid obviously had a special talent for self-effacement. Not to be defeated, she regarded him minutely. Probably in his early forties, she guessed, with a more powerful physique than his bowed shoulders suggested. Slightly hooded blue-gray eyes, of which she had seen only glimpses, so her power of observation was not so faulty after all. Small, even teeth. Nothing in his looks could justify such shyness. Perhaps he felt out of his element socially. The clothes didn't give obvious clues, except that they were what you expected a man twenty years older to wear. A white shirt and black tie under the raincoat. Was he an undertaker, perhaps? Not a policeman, for heaven's sake? Dark blue trousers, probably part of a suit. Black, well-polished laced-up shoes. The workingman's raincoat that he wouldn't be shedding, however warm the surroundings. And the flat cap on his knees. You poor, pathetic bloke, Shirley-Ann summed up. You're not enjoying this one bit, so why are you here?

Rupert had been slightly thrown by Sid's observation. 'The point I was about to make-I think-is that the sort of thing you people enjoy doesn't deserve to be called a crime novel. The only crime novelists worthy of the name are writers you've probably never heard of, let alone read. Ellroy, Vachss, Raymond-the ones bold enough to lift stones and show us the teeming activity underneath. Not country houses, but ghettos where young kids carry guns and murder for crack and even younger kids are sodomized. Corrupt cops taking bribes from pimps and beating confessions out of luckless Irish boys. Rape victims infected with AIDS. Squats littered with used syringes and verminous mattresses and roaches feeding on stale vomit.'

'I don't have the slightest desire to read about stale vomit,' said Miss Chilmark. 'You get enough of that on the television.'

'Precisely,' said Rupert. 'You switch channels and watch some sanitized story about a sweet old lady who makes nanas of the police through amateur detective work. The same formula week in, week out.'

'As a matter of fact, I hardly ever watch television these days,' Miss Chilmark told him loftily. 'I don't know why I still keep the set in my drawing room.'

Rupert's eyes glittered at the mention of Miss Chilmark's drawing room.

Polly cleared her throat and said, 'Did anyone wish to say any more about the classic detective story?'

'Is that what we were discussing?' Milo said with a disdainful look at Rupert. 'You could have fooled me. Yes, one of us obviously has to speak up for the story that challenges the reader, and as usual, it's me. I put it to you that the Golden Age writers between the wars brought the art of mystification to perfection. Regardless of what some of you were saying just now, I could name a dozen novels of that time, and probably more, that for the brilliance of their plotting stand comparison with anything written in the last half century. You may talk about the intricacy of a le Carre novel or the punching power of your hard-boiled Americans, but for me and for many others the test is whether the writer has the courage to lay out a mystery-a fair puzzle with clues-and say to the reader, 'Solve this if you can'-and then pull off a series of surprises topped by a stunning revelation at the end.'

'But at the cost of many of the other merits one looks for in a decent novel,' said Jessica with more restraint than Rupert.

'Such as…?'

'Character, pace, sharp dialogue, and, above all, credibility. The books you're talking about were excellent in their time, Milo, but they were never more than pleasant diversions.'

'Pastimes,' suggested Shirley-Ann, and got a nod from Jessica.

'That's a word you don't hear so much these days,' said Polly abstractedly. 'Pastimes. Nice word.'

Milo was not to be overridden. 'Of course, the most basic and fascinating form of detective puzzle is the locked room mystery.'

Rupert groaned and slid down in his chair with his long legs extended.

Milo ignored him. 'The master of the locked room mystery was John Dickson Carr. The 'hermetically sealed chamber'- as he called it-was a feature of many of his finest novels. I don't know which of you has read The Hollow Man.'

Shirley-Ann gingerly raised a hand. The only other reaction came, surprisingly, from Sid, who gave a nod without removing his gaze from his flat cap.

Milo said, 'In that case, I shall definitely bring my copy with me next week. Quite apart from being one of the most entertaining detective stories ever written, The Hollow Man has a famous chapter devoted to locked room mysteries. Dr. Fell, Dickson Carr's sleuth, holds up the action to deliver a lecture on the subject that is a delight from beginning to end. Am I right?' He looked toward Sid, who gave another nod.

'Yes, why not?' Milo went on. 'I shall read it to you next week, and I'll warrant that Dr. Fell will make some converts among you, even if I can't.'

Rupert confided loudly to Shirley-Ann, 'He's hooked on this hogwash, poor fellow. We'll never get him off it. Belongs to the Clue Klux Christie and the Daughters of Dorothy L. and the Stately Holmes Society. Quite mad. They think of themselves as scholars, these people. Believe me, my dear, the only fan club worth joining is the Sherlock Holmes Society of Australia. They meet once a year, get totally plastered, fire guns in the air and sing, 'Happy Birthday, Moriarty, you bastard, happy birthday to you!' '

Shirley-Ann felt some sympathy for Milo. He had been outnumbered even before Rupert's arrival.

Polly nudged the tiller again. The best way to focus the discussion, she said, might be to move on to the part of the evening when members spoke about particular books they had read recently. Miss Chilmark offered to begin, but the resourceful Polly remembered that Milo had somehow missed his turn at the previous meeting, so he went