ANONYMOUS FOOTSTEPS

By John MO'Connor. Cheshire House, New York

At one o'clock in the morning, on an isolated island in an Adirondack lake, a wild blizzard raging around the house, Henry Larnard is found by his nurse "with the gleaming hilt of a small dagger planted directly over his heart." That is the first (the second, if you count the mysterious death of Elizabeth, several years before) of a train of murders the perpetrator of which is revealed only in the last few pages. X will not say that it is impossible to guess the murderer some time before that (like every reader of detective stories, I rather pride myself on the ability to do that). But Mr. O'Connor has told his complicated story so ingeniously that the reader's interest is held to the very end. There are perhaps too many murders and in these days economy should be the fashion, even in murders. Nevertheless, each murder is adequately motivated and, granting the conventions of the murder story, plausible enough.

It seems to me, however, that Mr. O'Connor has not completely avoided one of the chief dilemmas that must confront any writer of detective stories, particularly a beginner. Our chief interest in a detective story, I suppose, is an intellectual one: it is a game or puzzle which we take delight in playing with the author or in solving. The factors in the game or puzzle, to be sure, are human beings and as such they must be adequately and plausibly drawn, but if our sympathies become too actively engaged with them and their fates, another more emotional element becomes involved in our response which is liable to interfere with our intellectual pleasure in solving the puzzle. It seems to me that the more successful writers of detective stories are careful not to let our emotions get too much concerned about their characters, contenting themselves so far as their readers' emotions go with the cutaneous shudder or the spinal shiver naturally aroused by crime on dark nights. There are exceptions, of course: one that immediately occurs to me is Frances Noyes Hart's Hide inthe Dark which, by the way, has a good many interesting points in common with Mr. O'Connor's story. But when you have stories of crime and detection in which the author becomes completely absorbed in his characters and their emotions you get a Brothers Karamazov which is something more, decidedly, most of us would agree, than a mere detective story.

Now there are in Anonymous Footsteps more than fleeting evidences of Mr. O'Connor's powers as a novelist. There is excellent atmosphere and description; there is the potentially dramatic romance between Neville and Ethel; there are excellent bits of characterization (Janet, for instance, is too promising a character to be murdered —we hate to see her die and a writer of detective stories should beware of arousing too much regret for his corpses); there is a dinner that gives an excellent sense of life. But there are not enough of all these things to make Mr. O'Connor's murders genuine tragedies and there are too many of them to let us accept the events in his story as merely exciting mysteries to solve.

In short, in this book, Mr. O'Connor has not written a completely satisfactory detective story, which was his main intention, nor has he on the other hand, of course, done more than suggest here and there the reality and emotional power that we look for in a good novel. But in this first book he has shown that he could fabricate a good detective story and also write a good novel—if he would beware of trying to do them both at once. I have not meant to imply that Anonymous Footsteps is not entertaining reading in itself. For me, however, it is worth more as promising what we may confidently expect from Mr. O'Connor in the way of detective stories or novels, either one or both. I look forward to his next book, detective story or novel, whichever it may be.