Crime Ain’t What It Used to Be

‘If crime writing is your business,” young authors used to be told, “keep politics as a hobby. If politics is your business, keep crime writing as a hobby.” And this injunction was, on the whole, obeyed. Even those vociferous and prolific socialists, G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, wrote conventional English detective stories—dull, but almost entirely free from politics. Rex Stout’s liberalism played no part in the early Nero Wolfe novels. If we knew nothing of Dashiell Hammett except his books, we could scarcely deduce his political views.

Sometimes, of course, an author’s inclination peeped through. At the beginning of Three Inquisitive People—the first written, though not first published, novel by Dennis Wheatley, a very popular British author of adventure thrillers—the Duke de Richleau invites his American guest to dine at a club where “the word socialism has never penetrated and women do not come”: and in The Forbidden Territory, the first of Wheatley’s novels to appear (in 1933), the Soviet Union is undoubtedly an Evil Empire. Wheatley was always a Right-minded man, as befitted the grandson of a successful Mayfair grocer known as “Ready-Money” Wheatley.

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About the Author

Anthony Lejeune

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Vietnam

‘If crime writing is your business,” young authors used to be told, “keep politics as a hobby. If politics is your business, keep crime writing as a hobby.” And this injunction was, on the whole, obeyed. Even those vociferous and prolific socialists, G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, wrote conventional English detective stories—dull, but almost entirely free from politics. Rex Stout’s liberalism played no part in the early Nero Wolfe novels. If we knew nothing of Dashiell Hammett except his books, we could scarcely deduce his political views.

Sometimes, of course, an author’s inclination peeped through. At the beginning of Three Inquisitive People—the first written, though not first published, novel by Dennis Wheatley, a very popular British author of adventure thrillers—the Duke de Richleau invites his American guest to dine at a club where “the word socialism has never penetrated and women do not come”: and in The Forbidden Territory, the first of Wheatley’s novels to appear (in 1933), the Soviet Union is undoubtedly an Evil Empire. Wheatley was always a Right-minded man, as befitted the grandson of a successful Mayfair grocer known as “Ready-Money” Wheatley.