Ralph Cohen
PRIVATE EYES AND PUBLIC CRITICS
It has, perhaps, not been sufficiently remarked that the
"age of criticism" has coincided with the age of the murder mystery.
The period which William Van O'Connor has identified as the half–
century of the critical mind and W.
K.
Wimsatt, Jr. has-with insight
--denoted the true age of criticism:
this
period is also marked by
the flourishing of the murder mystery and the rise of the "private
eye." These phenomena may seem to the uninitiate unrelated and
accidental, but the organic unity of culture accounts for both, and
some critics with liberal imagination have attended to both.
Critics such as Joseph Wood Krutch and Jacques Barzun have
found in mystery novels the cultural search for security, the probing
for justice, and Malcolm Cowley has even suggested that the more
recent works exhibit an attack on the American matriarchal social
pattern. These critics have
also
tracked down Faulkner in Y'oknapa–
tawpha County, egotism in modern man, and Johnson in the Mitre
Tavern. But so far as I know-and to paraphrase Kenneth Burke,
I have done my homework here-no critic has yet noticed the under–
lying structural pattern governing murder mysteries and literary crit–
icism. And the provocative insight is that they both form a single
organic
art
that only in our time has begun to be fused in its original
Renaissance function. Indeed no critic has realized the underlying
structural resemblance between the tolerance for murder in our
mysteries and the pluralism of criticism in our explicators, or, to
put it paradoxically, the tolerance for murder
in
our critics and the
pluralism of criticism in our mysteries.
It is perhaps necessary to distinguish murder mysteries from hor–
ror stories, thrillers, and ghost stories in order to establish the differ–
entia of the genre. Murder mysteries are characterized by the detec–
tive, more symbolically, the "private eye," the death situation, the
